| Archive for langcafe2.myfreeforum.org Come in and have your daily cup of languages! |
| Kirk |
I met Deborah! :)Hello, everyone!Sorry for my absence, I really do miss spending more time here at Langcafé and meeting up with the very lovely Deborah earlier tonight reminded me all the more of that! Deborah and I met after work at a coffee place and had a great time. So many things to talk about! :D Anyway, just wanted to say hi to everyone and I'm looking forward to meeting up with you again, Deborah! (and if anyone else is ever in the area you're of course welcome to join). :D |
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| Deborah |
Wow, you're prompt! I keep putting off posting anything in that thread about who we have the most in common with, but I've always known that Kirk was one of the people I felt most in synch with. Sure enough, we had a most enjoyable conversation -- the first of many, I hope.
Oh, and for those of you who've been wondering about what Kirk's been doing for a living, I'll jump in, in case he doesn't get around to it soon, and tell you that he has a job as a discourse analyst. But I'll leave it to him to explain what that is. (Um...what is that again, Kirk?). And, yes, if any other langcafeinos are ever in the neighborhood, I would also be very happy to get together with you. |
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| Lazar |
Hi Kirk! I actually just joined here yesterday. | ||||||||
| Kirk |
And me likewise with you!
Me too :)
Hehe it's a really interesting but entirely hard-to-explain job ;) But I'm getting better at describing it. Basically I analyze linguistic patterns and help program my analyses into my company's proprietary software which is used to help companies organize and find information in their electronic documents. In the computer age it's gotten to the point where companies can easily have millions and millions of electronic documents and the less you know what you have the worse off, generally. This is especially the case when litigation is involved. You don't want any surprises in the courtroom! And complete human review is out of the question when we're talking about millions of documents and pages. So my company, H5, is all about combining human and computer intelligence to manage information. You may want to check out the website to learn more. Anyway, I love it because I work with 40 other linguists (about 1/3 of the company...counting full-time employees at least) and we get paid to do linguistic analysis all day. And make geeky linguistics jokes :D My title is Discourse Analyst, and disourse analysis is a subfield of linguistics. Also related to what I do is another related subfield, corpus linguistics, if you're interested in reading up a bit on that. By the way, can you see these links? In the skin I currently have the links don't show up as different from the rest of the text but I have hyperlinks where I wrote the name of my company and my job title and corpus linguistics.
Hey, Lazar! Long time no chat. Good to see you're back, too :) |
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| greg in noord-frankrijk |
That sounds like a very interesting position, Kirk. When lexic means serious business. 
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| Kirk |
Yeah! It is very interesting. I feel really fortunate to have gotten a position doing something (I at least find) interesting and working with other linguists. It's really humbling for me--I have my bachelor's degree but a good deal of my coworkers have Masters and PhDs in linguistics so they are true experts in what they do and are really interesting people to talk with. I'm not sure if I already mentioned it but I found out about the job by going to, of all things, a pizza party. The UCSD Ling Dept. has a year-end pizza party every year for the graduating students who did linguistics and I ended up talking with one of my Teaching Assistants who I'd had for a couple of classes and really liked. She asked me what I was doing after graduation and I told her I had no clue but that I wanted to do something language-related, if possible. She then recommended I check out this company because she has several friends who used to do grad school ling at UCSD who now work here. She was kind enough (this is way above and beyond the call of duty for what TAs normally do!) to email me the information of the company and she gave me an introduction to her friend and I sent in my résumé and got an interview! All pretty much because I decided to go to a pizza party (I'm so glad I did---a friend of mine was having a birthday party at the same time so it was a tough choice but in hindsight I think I made the right decision ;) ). Lesson learned--don't underestimate the power of networking, even when you have no idea you're actually going to be networking till it happens! |
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| Uriel |
It's ALL who you know, isn't it? I think that's why Americans are the masters of the art of small talk -- we have to be, if we want to keep our noses above water! And it's amazing what tips will come your way if you just strike up a casual conversation with a stranger, or keep your ears open amongst friends. | ||||||||