My commitment to mentoring looks different in industry than it did in academia! I still work closely with my more junior colleagues, sometimes as an official mentor, and now I also reach out to teach and train beyond my immediate coworkers and collaborators.
I work to foster relationships with graduate students, researchers, and the broader community. With these groups I serve as a resource about industry in general, Duolingo in particular, and how we can work together to serve language learners and language enthusiasts across our fields.
For more information on moving from academia to industry, check out my post-ac guide especially for researchers in the fields of languages and language sciences.
Graduate students in the social sciences develop the skills and domain-specific knowledge to be successful throughout industry and post-ac. However, many don't have access to mentors who understand both academia and industry to help prepare them for careers outside the tenure track. This was true for me as well!
Today, in my own post-ac career, I connect with graduate students to help them understand their options and identify the skills they will need to succeed in whatever path they choose. Because of my own cross-disciplinary academic training, I am able to show graduate students the value of their experiences using the vocabulary they know best. As permanent, full-time faculty positions becoming increasingly rare, it's important for graduate students to know that they do have options outside professorships and that alt-ac careers can be challenging and fulfilling, too.
Please reach out for more information or to discuss whether your group would be interested in a talk about industry!
I regularly present to students across the social sciences about my transition to industry, what has been rewarding, what has been surprising, and what I've had to learn. These industry talks can be tailored for linguists, students in the language sciences (including in psychology and communication sciences), or the social sciences and/or humanities more broadly. I have engaged with undergraduate and graduate students through department colloquia, workshops, and alt-ac panels at conferences. My presentations can be scheduled for 30mins to 60mins or more, depending on need and audience.
Here is a sample of the venues at which I have recently presented:
Undergraduate Students in Linguistics, University of Southern California
Classical & Modern Languages & Literatures Colloquium, Texas Tech University
CUNY Professional Development, Department of Linguistics, CUNY
National Symposium on Spanish as a Heritage Language
Research Roundtable Speaker Series, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Pittsburgh
Translation as a profession (graduate seminar), Department of Modern Languages, Carnegie Mellon University
I also deliver workshops on topics related to making the transition from academia to industry. These workshops can be freestanding or can be part of a longer visit involving an industry presentation. The workshops are hands-on and participants leave the session with a product they can use as they continue to explore career options.
Workshops can cover:
Identifying and developing transferable skills
Preparing materials for industry
Communicating research to a general audience
An idea you have that would benefit your group!
In my work at Duolingo, I also support opportunities for graduate students to interact with industry, especially in their research endeavors. I have developed tools for those conducting research with Duolingo, I have served on the committee administering Duolingo's graduate research grant program (see our 2021 call for applications for master's and PhD students), and I co-organize our Research Colloquium series, which invites academic researchers (including graduate students!) to share their work with our research teams.
It's important to me to maintain connections with the research community and to develop new relationships as my own research evolves. To this end, I attend conferences and workshops and lead research "lab meetings" to read and discuss the latest language learning research with my colleagues. I also co-organize Duolingo's Research Colloquia series (more information here). I regularly share my own experiences as a psycholinguist in industry at department colloquia (see With graduate students section above); via linguistics communication platforms, like the Superlinguo blog; and on Twitter.
At Duolingo, I extend our mission of making language learning accessible to all by making our company an inviting and collaborative place for our community. I regularly host graduate students for lunch to make Duolingo and industry more approachable and to assist in students' networking, and we are able to have informal conversations with people from around the company about their work in edtech.
I have also coordinated class visits for middle schoolers and high schoolers, information sessions for language instructors, and workshops for NGOs. Depending on the group, ages, and interests, these visits may include meetings with different roles across Duolingo, workshops and hands-on activities, and learning about how we use data and research to inform our teaching.
Together with the Learning & Curriculum organization, I helped to host Literacy Pittsburgh's annual Tutor Conference. This collaboration created a bidirectional partnership by which my company was able to learn more about the work and needs of literacy tutors in our community, and the tutors were able to learn about the products Duolingo offers to support educators and their students.