Facilitating Placement

To facilitate student transition from graduate study to employment, the department will host a series of informal lunches every year where speakers who have recently and successfully made that transition share their experiences with current graduate students. In particular, invited speakers will highlight the language science skills that are most useful to them, how they identified the post-graduate opportunities they pursued, and the steps they took to successfully pursue those opportunities. This can bring potential opportunities to graduate student attention that they may not have considered before, and can provide specific examples of successful language science trajectories. This also gives graduate students a chance to ask more targeted questions about post-graduate opportunities that they’re personally interested in from someone who has specific knowledge of that opportunity.

More generally, the skillset our graduate training provides is of great use both within the specific area of language science and to twenty-first century science more broadly. For language science, this program trains students for careers that combine the rigorous scientific study of language with quantitative approaches, which is what leads to a wealth of employment opportunities. For science more broadly, this program trains students to not only conduct scientific inquiry in a rigorous way but also to be able to communicate the scientific process and its results to society more generally. This is one reason the training includes an explicit communication skills sequence, and allows our graduates to make scientific discoveries more accessible to people everywhere.