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.
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."