forum beruf applied linguistics 2019
The third annual Forum Beruf Applied Linguistics took place on Wednesday, November 6th, 2019. Four alumni of the IAAK presented their perspectives on career outlooks for students studying linguistics. The event was moderated by Katrin Renkwitz, M.A.
From left to right: Laura Dreesen, Elisabeth Hampel, Theresa Krumbiegel, Tatiana Pashkova
Elisabeth Hampel
Sachbearbeiterin beim Pädagogischen Austauschdienst, Sekretariat der Kulturministerkonferenz
At her current job, she is in charge of different exchange programmes for students and teachers and is involved in all organisational tasks from the selection of participants to evaluation and programme development. She also organizes workshops and excursions and gets to travel quite often. One of her current projects offers virtual exchange trips, where German and Chinese students get to know each other’s environments using virtual reality and 360° videos.
Theresa Krumbiegel
Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin, Fraunhofer Institut für Kommunikation, Informationsverarbeitung, und Ergonomie
Theresa shared how her time as an intern at the Fraunhofer Institute led to a student job and, later, a full-time position. The various projects she has worked on during her time there so far—from learning Python and working on a machine translation task to developing an automatic classification system for Twitter and compiling her own linguistic corpora—have allowed her to develop new skills on the job. She also emphasized the importance of going to conferences in order to learn about new perspectives in the field.
Tatiana Pashkova
Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin und Doktorandin, Technische Universität Kaiserslautern
Tatiana gave insight on what it is like to be a PhD student. She spends a lot of time traveling for her job, running experiments, and going to conferences. Her time as a master’s student in the M.A. Applied Linguistics program allowed her to practice designing her own empirical research projects and gain experience recruiting and working with participants for her experiments. She also benefited from opportunities to attend student conferences (including the BAELc4, StuTS, and T.W.I.S.T.) and internships (at Radbound University and MIP Nijmegen). She advised interested students to look for PhD programs with funding, as not all available positions are always paid, and emphasized the importance of having skills in statistics, generative syntax, eye-tracking, EEG, fMRI, and German for a job like hers. In addition, she encouraged students to check out linguistics mailing lists such as Linguist List, AMLaP-List, and info-CHILDES.
Laura Dreessen
Voice Architect, VUI.agency
After completing her PhD at the University of Bonn on microlinguistic patterns in language, Laura began working for VW, where she annotated corpora of Italian speech and worked on a natural language understanding (NLU) system. She subsequently became interested in UX (user experience) design, specifically voice user interface design, eventually taking courses in the subject to deepen her knowledge. She emphasized the need for linguists and the value of linguistic knowledge in this area of work.
We would like to thank our presenters for sharing their experiences and advice with us and wish them all the best in the future!
read about the first annual Forum Beruf Applied Linguistics 2017 event -->
read about the second annual Forum Beruf Applied Linguistics 2018 event -->
