Hello linguists and other social scientists outside academia! I am collecting as many diverse titles of #AltAc jobs as I can find. Please share yours! Bonus if you have a link to a job ad with a description of this job, or if you can add a brief description of your own
Extra bonus for any other titles you can think of.
Context: I am teaching a Careers for Linguists workshop, and creating detailed course notes that I plan to share with the ling community later.
So much for my father's side of the family! Good thing I decided to post what I had so far because Twitter (again!) died and lost some text I wrote.
Anyway, onto part 2, my mom's side!
The Sternheim/Baum family of Germany. A secular family Jewish German living in Hamm, with a history of many generations in the area of Nordrhein Westfalen. Maximilian was a soldier in World War 1, was badly injured, and received the Iron Cross. He worked as a salesperson
Mother Selma née Baum was from the Dortmund area, also in Northern Germany, and also many generations there. That family was merchants who owned some stores in the area. During/after the war, as the family tree shows, that family fled and dispersed all across the globe
Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel. It's one of the only days in the year that I miss being there, instead of here going to the office as usual on a Monday morning.
This thread commemorates some of my murdered relatives, they are not forgotten 🧵
The Goldstein family of Hungary/Slovakia. The grandmother Zuzka (Ruth) is second from the top in the first pic. Parents Henriette & Isidor's love story is a classic; they eloped and were disowned by her rich family. He was an engineer with Skoda. Kids are Eva, Agi, Zuzka, Michael
They were all sent to Auschwitz as part of the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews in spring 1944.
The 3 sisters survived, along with Aunt Lilly. Mom, grandparents, aunts, other relatives perished in the camp; Dad, Micheal died on the Death March to Mauthausen, still a teenager
A common convo I have with PhD students who are about to graduate:
Them: I haven't done anything useful/good/impressive
Me: You got good grades in undergrad
Them: right, but
Me: and got admitted into this grad program
Them: ..
Me: and got a fellowship / other financial support
Me: and you completed PhD level coursework
Them: ..
Me: as well as multiple projects and papers of varying lengths
Them: ..
Me: and you compiled research insights into written form and presented them to others
Them: ..
Me: and you're currently working on a multi-year innovative >
> project that's advancing the scientific community's understanding of X
Them: ..
Me: I'm going to guess you organized some reading groups or conferences or other multi-participant, multi-speaker events
Them: ..
Me: and you've taught complex material to diverse audiences
Academics: the results of your research are less relevant to getting an #AltAc job than the skills you used to obtain them!
Here's a 🧵 on transferable skills translated into corporatespeak, including resume bullet points that describe my own academic career:
1. Experimental design, data analysis:
Quant and qual methods, exp design, and other variations on this theme are by far the most common answer I get from former academics re: what skills from grad school are most useful in their new career. E.g. for my dissertation work:
"Designed and conducted 15 behavioral experiments and tested 500+ participants to study the structure and meaning of complex questions in English; wrote design documents and guidelines; analyzed the results using linear and logistic mixed effects models in R."