LCL Technical: NON-PROFIT JOBS - LSA Symposium 2021 session 3 of 3

[Music] So, our last panel today is talking with folks who primarily work in nonprofit, although of course we want to hear about your career path and the other for-profit jobs that you may have had leading up to this and what your career path might look like after it. Hey, there he is. Hey, Bill. So glad you were able to make it. Great. So, here are our three panelists. We're going to get started right now. And as before with the other panelists, what I'd like to do is to ask each of you in turn to talk a little bit about your career path from academia to where you are now. If you can just take a couple of minutes to do that and then we'll dive into some of the questions. So, Sean, can I ask you to go first? Sure. No problem. Um, thanks for having me. Thanks for setting this all up. Uh my name is Sean Isanu Johnson. Um so my background is in linguistics. I got my undergraduate degree from UC Santa Cruz uh in linguistics and then I got my master's in forensic linguistics from Hofster University. I just graduated with my master's last spring so 2020. Um and I became interested in plain language during my uh graduate degree. Um, I'll talk about this more later, but I really bounced around a lot. Um, I was interested in socio linguistics and the theoretical linguistics and corpus linguist linguistics. Um, and I eventually became interested in plain language and the plain language world kind of sucked me in. I wrote my thesis on plain language and then just kind of accidentally committed to that path and then I got a job at a center for civic design as a contractor in August of last year and I was just hired full-time as a my role is a civic designer researcher and plain language lead. Awesome. Hey, congratulations on the the hiring. That's awesome. There's a couple things you mentioned that I want to come back to, but I I would like to go around and get other people's talks. So, Bill, can you talk about your path? Yeah, sure. Hi. So, Bill Marcelino, I'm a senior behavioral scientist at the Rand Corporation. So, I do public policy work across a range of areas, some things like health and education, mostly though, uh, national defense and national security issues. My, um, I came to get a doctorate later in life. So, I had a whole prior life as a US Marine Corps listed an officer. years later uh I you know I'd already had an English degree in um undergraduate I had an English degree for the heck of it uh masters I got my PhD uh later in life at Carnegie Mill University and my PhD is in rhetoric at an English department however uh my course work looked like corpus linguistics uh work uh soci linguistics and field uh field work in ethnography uh discourse analysis and my doctoration actually was um a field ethnography I lived with US Marines things for seven months and did an ethnography of communication. Um, and anyways, uh, when I graduated, uh, I didn't want to go into the academic world. I ended up, uh, going into the public policy, uh, research world. So, I kind of transitioned from being a rhetoric person and a, I guess, a trained as a linguist to a social scientist, uh, at Rand. Over. Great. Thank you. And McKenzie, let's hear about yours. Hi, everyone. Uh, my name is McKenzie Price. I'm uh zooming in today uh from Washington DC. I am a I I'm a language uh strategist and messaging and communications consultant for not exclusively nonprofit organizations but mostly nonprofit organizations. And I've worked um both serving nonprofits and inside of nonprofit organizations of various types. So direct service research more think tanky um across you know different parts of my work history um as a linguist I am an interactional socio linguist I but I've lived a couple of different linguist lives so I was a variationist at one point uh I also you know there's a deep part of my heart that is all about uh African-American English and thinking about how that's traveled through the black diaspora across the world. Uh I've done discourse analysis and different types of or different types of discourse analysis. My dissertation was um both conversation analysis and ethnography uh and ethnography of communication in terms of other parts of linguistics that I'm interested in. Um, I'm I think the most excited about um framing and narrative, but of course I'm really interested in question asking and advice giving as kind of different types of interaction. And I pursue all of those interests in working with nonprofit organizations that have framing and messaging difficulties. So, for example, I've been doing a lot of work lately that's around policing and policing reform. And so, how can you use framing to think about uh something like a conversation about police uh uh funding an organization, which you might recognize as the defund the police conversation? And you might be wondering if my work is about like should we call it that or should we call it something else? But there's more to it than that. and some of the what we might think of as a conflict about that is uh a question of framing and uh how frames work um and and who they work for. So those are some of the things that I do on a day-to-day basis as a linguist. It sounds like your work is very intersectional that it draws together a lot of of threads and things that interest you personally. Yes. Yes. things that interest me personally and are an important part of um justice in this world. Yeah, that's awesome. How how is it in Washington today? Things okay? Well, truthfully, I just got here. I was not in DC um this week, but uh the sun is shining and um uh when I if Yeah, I just got here. Okay. I've been away. Yeah, I'm I'm sure everybody is well aware of what's been going on. Uh so, uh Sean, just to flip back to you for a moment, could you talk a little bit about your training in forensic linguistics? I'm not sure that the people who are attending know what that is, and I know we have a couple other forensic linguists who are attendees today. So, if you could just say a few words about what that was and and what the degree entailed. Sure. So um I think I while I was doing the graduate degree it occurred to me that there are kind of two ways of looking at forensic linguistics. I think the more traditional and narrower way to define it is like um looking at language as evidence. So anytime when there are like um like confessions in a case or um anytime where like language needs to be analyzed in the context of a criminal case. But then more recently I think that the definition has expanded to mean any time that like language and law intersect and I was more interested in that version of forensic linguistics. So during my graduate degree, I became interested in this branch of law and linguistics that used corpus linguistics to try to um get at the heart of this question of what is like the ordinary meaning of laws. So um using corpora to shed light on the question of what is the um like on on using it to like do statutory interpretation basically. Um but beside that I think I became interested in um plain language because there are a lot of interesting legal implications behind it and I started to look at plain language as like a social justice issue and I I came across um a lot of interesting literature that made me realize that by not using plain language you're often excluding people from participating in government or participating in civic institutions. Um so my journey started by uh trying to find a connection between like my interests in social justice but then also my interests in linguistics and then going in through a a forensic linguistics program and then coming out of it. It kind of came full circle for me. Interesting. Cool. Um, Bill, the work that you do at Rand, does that cross over with what Sean was just describing a bit? Uh, a little bit. Although it's interesting, you know, for me, uh, linguistic forensics is about linguistic matching to get machines to identify or or to have a machine statistically or through machine learning identify, uh, either um, uh, documents or authors. So for example, we do a lot of work where we uh build machine learning models or uh use something like confirmatory factor analysis to actually say like hey who's posting these things you know teaching my students for example like one of my students had a great project recently where they did a linguistic forensics analysis of QAnon the QAnon author and was able to show really really large variation between different movements of QAnon to different boards that suggest pretty strongly it's a different author um or someone with extreme extraordinary control over lexog grammatical stylistic elements which are really hard to control like it's pretty easy to topic do topics it's harder to do something like you know stylistics um anyways so yeah um I think uh is that your question Laurel yeah no no that was great and and I was going to ask you elaborate a little bit on what you do daytoday in your job it sounds like it's a lot of corpus analysis yeah so um I am the product owner for Rand lex. So um I I realized quickly at rand that I was a bottleneck for labor. I was the only I mean was a linguist in in Washington DC means you speak like Farsy or Russian. Um so I was the only linguist at Rand and so anything involving linguistic analysis anything at scale using machines. Um even like uh discourse analysis I was the only person to do it. So I've spent the last uh six or seven years building a large scale like a scalable platform. So we've got like lexical level tests like keenness and collic kit word and context uh kind of stuff. So a lot of standard corpus analysis tests um also stylistic uh um uh stuff as well to identify like author genre that kind of stuff and then also machine learning and to make it usable. So like web- based uh like anyone here could use this software because it's sort of scaffolded and built in. If you have sort of like general scientific knowledge or general researcher you could use it. So that's a big part of is making democratizing um uh scalable language analytics. The other part is um on uh and this is maybe key for you all here in the audience. No one knows what discourse analysis is. Like when I walked into Rand, I'm like I like to do some discourse analysis please. They're like what are you talking about? I sound like an idiot. Uh because I was not speaking their language. But when I said I want to do qualitative content analysis, everyone understood that. Um, and like the fine point of like the hows and wise of of discourse analysis versus the kind of what of content analysis, that's a fine point. So, I guess what I'm getting at is that um, if you're able to translate some of the things that we do in linguistics that are specialized to the disciplinary language and find the the coralates in general social science or in marketing or wherever that line up with that so you can authentically do it that it's credible. I can actually do this. That's a huge uh a huge benefit. So the the other chunk of my work is acting as a uh content or collecting qualitative data and then doing a variety of analytic methods many of which look like um linguistic methods over okay McKenzie can you talk a little bit too isue which has come up many times today about the the need to translate your linguistic skills into whatever people who aren't linguist can understand, right? Like saying discourse analysis, people don't get it. So, you have to frame it as a different way. How do you do that in your job? I a lot of my uh day-to-day sounds similar to uh Bill's day-to-day. Um and and and and and also a point that I think was made in the last panel which is uh thinking about power and how and kind of the presentation of self and also where interactions might be going off track. I I do a lot of that. But to get to the core part of your question, how do you do that translation um activity? Um, so part of it is thinking about at least for me what I don't you don't have to translate everything frankly. So what are the things that you do need to translate in order to kind of get to the next step and sometimes that's why this matters. So you're making a case for your work. Sometimes it's process. Sometimes it's about uh um uh you know I here's why I need this specific tool in order to do this content analysis. Uh so making those kinds of cases. Um and I think that I also draw on you know my background in doing a lot of graduate level teaching right to uh in terms of the the the explanation or even kind of drawing connections between um different parts of a project. I draw on that background a lot too in my dayto-day. Interesting. I I think that's something that people undervalue in themselves just generally speaking across these three panels. You know, all of us have had some teaching experience. I think given our our graduate school background and that kind of experience is invaluable when it comes to presenting the work that we've done and and just what you were saying Mackenzie like drawing things together, explaining to people why something is important. And I know for me personally, I didn't think that was important when I started to work in industry. It was like, oh, I taught that has nothing to do with business. But it is so important to be able to stand up in front of a group with confidence and say, here's why this matters and here are the things that you need to understand. So for all of the the students who are attending, you know, that's important that you can do that and if you can do it in the context of a linguistics class, you can do it in the context of business as well. So put that up there as as something that you know how to do. That's very very important. Uh let's see. So let's talk a little bit about um how you guys found your jobs. So we can start again. So Sean, this job that you have now, uh you were saying you bounced around a lot and then you landed here. We've been hearing so often today that the way you get your jobs is through networking. So was it networking that got you into this job? Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. So, um I there was a a conference at my um university or when I was doing my graduate degree. Um it was hosted by the law school at Haftra and it was a plain language for lawyers uh conference. So, it was like mostly a way of like teaching lawyers how to use plain language and judges and just a way of it it was primarily directed at lawyers. Um, but I went anyway because I had free time. And um, I met a Supreme a New York State Supreme Court justice there. And um, I didn't have any idea what I was doing. I really didn't know what plain language was, but I knew that I was interested in it. Um, maybe like subconsciously, like even what I like to read in my free time, I tended to like like simpler writing. Um, so anyway, I met um, Supreme New York State Supreme Court Justice uh, Lucy Billings there and uh, she basically offered me um, an internship on the spot. Um it was unpaid but um from there she introduced me to another judge uh Judge Ed Edwina Mendelson also part of the New York State um court system and I worked for one of her offices called the office for justice initiatives and um basically helped them you use lang uh plain language in everything from like um jury instructions and judicial opinions, web content that even like internal emails and like memoranda and stuff like these long emails like FAQs that they had received. Um, so that was definitely my foot in the door and I kind of realized then that like this was probably worth pursuing and but I was still really ambivalent. I didn't really know if that was going to, you know, like provide me with like any job opportunities. So I kind of committed to it but I had one foot in and one foot out and then eventually it was clear that that was a path for me. Yeah. Cool. Bill, what about you? Uh so both networking and uh me choosing to go out and uh compete for a um an internship for well uh a fellowship actually. Um so I went to Rand uh and applied for their um summer associate program which is a really cool paid um fellowship. You work on projects during the summer time. You have to find a mentor and you to work on projects. And so, um, I did that actually two summers in a row, which is kind of unusual. I got to work on a range of national defense projects. Um, suicide prevention for the military behavioral health kind of stuff. Really cool things. Got to use a lot of discourse analysis, corpus linguistics on, um, a large range of onbari uh, interviews to make sense of a really really large uh, transcript set, that kind of stuff. Um, and so that eventually led to my my job at Rand. But then there was also a um uh a networking aspect to it. So I can remember um when I went ABD, I wasn't ready to go go to Rand yet. Didn't have my didn't have my actual diploma yet. Um so my network I built at Rand included a lot of former US Marines and one of those Marines got me a job or got me introduction and then I got a job uh with the Marine Corps as a contract um behavioral scientist for a year uh while I was ABD. Pretty cool. got treated as a full scientist and got to do ethnographic work um on marine resilience and suicide prevention. Wow. Oh, so interesting. How did you find out about the fellowship? Um so I think my I finished my coursework and done my uh what do we midterms? What do you call it? Like qualifying my qualifying exams. I'm like okay I should probably think now about like jobs and that kind of stuff and where am I going to go? So I sat down started googling like internships, summer summer fellowships and I just Googled all these ones and I made a huge list. I went to my faculty and asked them if they had any recommendation on them. I sort of wouldn't it down and tried to sort them all by you know sort of match and in particular I was like this rand one sounds amazing because I don't I don't want to be in the academic world. I don't want to I don't want to be a professor. Um and so and I do want to do important work and I also don't want to do for-profit work. Not that it's wrong. I I did not want to do for-profit work. And so it's a pretty at that point you're kind of small little intersection to find what you want. Um and then I wrote to people. So I actually wrote to Laura Miller who is um a really senior and really important um military sociologist. She's probably the leading female like like women in the military um sociologist in America. And um I wrote to her and said, "Hey, here I am. Here's what I want to do. Can I talk to you?" and she ended up being my mentor and getting me as a summer associate. So, I think not being afraid to reach out to somebody directly. And by the way, I get those emails all the time. I have grad students write to me constantly, hey, what about this? Give me a recommendation. How do I do that? That kind of stuff. And I'm always open to talking to people. And I think for those of you who are students, I mean, maybe there's a jerk out there, but I think most people are willing to help you, give you, you know, give you some advice or whatever, hook you up or something like that. Yeah. Great. And so McKenzie, um I'm I'm curious to know how you if it was networking or or other things. And then also have you had the same experience as Bill? Like do people ping you a lot about opportunities or advice or informational interviews? They do. And um you know I so networking is of course important. I I think that there are at least two levels of of networking and both of them are important. So, one is no matter what you have to reach out and talk to people, but you can reach out and talk to people about specific employment opportunities and sometimes that looks like I see you have a job posted and I'm not a good fit for that, but I'd love to talk to you about, you know, x other thing. There's that kind of cold calling and talking to people, but then there's also the reaching out and saying, "I want to learn more about what you do. I want to I'm curious about this question that might come up. I think it comes up in your work. Can we talk about it?" And and then in those conversations saying, "Who else can I talk to to further to to learn more about this?" And so that kind of networking is purely about talking. Nowhere in there are you saying it's purely about talking and I think that both of those are two types of conversations that I have had in my um networking journey and both of those have led to different opportunities too. So it's not that um you know I think there are a lot of things you can talk about in those networking conversations in terms of um and then another thing that um when I think about people who reach out to me um people reach out to me in both of those ways. So can I talk to you about this specific opportunity um or how I could position myself for other opportunities or can I talk to you more generally and and are there other people you can introduce me to? Um and then I also in terms of you know for my own work one thing that was important for me is um uh I in addition to doing informational interviews just going to um other kinds of like public events, conferences, webinars and especially as uh you know as the pandemic continues a lot of um a lot of conversations and fields have been driven, you know, onto platforms like this onto Zoom. And so signing up for different list serves and just pursuing things that I've been interested in kind of gets you into rooms with people that you'd never met before and that I think helps continue uh the the process of networking because you find new people to talk to, new questions that you might be interested in. So, uh, talk to people, reach out to people, and go to a lot of public discussions about stuff you think is cool. Yeah, that that's great advice. Uh, you're right. I think the pandemic has really pushed a lot of this stuff um to forums that are more accessible in ways. Of course, you know, we all miss being able to to talk to someone outside a conference in the hallway while we're having coffee, but the fact that you can now attend a big meeting every week if you want to is tremendous. And making yourself visible and making contact with people, I think, is super important. And one thing you guys have all said, and I think we heard it too from the other folks, is that it's important not to be afraid to contact people, right? You just have to do it. You know, Sean, you talked to a state supreme court justice and and Bill, you talked to, you know, the most important person in the area that you wanted to do. You you I feel maybe you guys can address this a little bit. I feel like as academics, when we got our training in academia, we were taught to be a little bit afraid to talk to people. You know, you don't want to waste their time. You have a question about this, you're not going to go send Nam Chosky an email because he's way too important and busy to talk to you. And in industry, it's just not like that. you know, you can reach out to people, they'll respond to you or not, but you don't feel bad about it and you don't get a black mark against you for just reaching out and and talking to people. So, do you guys all feel that way? And have you had that experience of just like reaching out and seeing what happens? Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's an important part of what you mentioned. People can get back to you or not. And that's okay. Like it's it's okay. you know, we're all just their people. You're a person. They might not get back to you. So, write them again. You know, it's it's okay. Um, so yes, I've experienced that. That's great. Bill, do you feel that the same way? Well, you did it obviously and it worked for you. Um, Sean, what about you? Have um how how much courage did it take to walk up to that state supreme court justice and and say, "Hi." So, I didn't know who she was. Um, everybody else in the room knew who she was because they were all lawyers and they had probably all argued cases in front of her, but I didn't know who she was. So, that probably worked in my favor. So, I wasn't really She's a very small woman, so she's very unintimidating and she's very sweet and nice. So, like I didn't feel intimidated in that sense. But to echo Mackenzie's point, I definitely did. After I graduated, I kept a spreadsheet of every job I ever applied to and I probably got I probably applied at 20 jobs in a few months and I got just even a response from three. I got one interview and that was the job that I got. So to echo McKenzie's point, sometimes like you can hit people up and sometimes they get back to you and sometimes they don't and that's okay and it's hard to not take that personally, but that's just like a reality. Yeah, that's that's great. I I think it's an important lesson for people to learn coming out of academia. Um, on that topic, this is not specific to our our area of nonprofit, but what do you think is the biggest difference for you between the academic environment and the the industry? I'm calling it industry even though it's nonprofit. Like, what stands out to you as as the biggest difference that you had to learn when you were making that transition? Maybe Sean, you could start and we'll we'll go around again. The first thing that comes to mind is like especially as like a linguist is that the audience is different. So I've been working on a white paper and the audience for the white paper is um legislators um it's a white paper on how the bad design and bad language of ballot envelopes makes it like ripe for people to forget to sign. And so I came at that from a very academic point of view. I mean, I haven't even I haven't even done that much academic writing, but it's really the only type of writing I know. And so, I came at it from that point of view. And the director of Center for Civic Design, Whitney Quezinberry, who is brilliant, she we had a lot of long conversations about what the effect of using certain like styles of writing is. So, trying to use and especially because the paper is about plain language. it was kind of hypocritical for me to not use plain language to talk about why plain language is so important. Um, so that was a huge kind of shift and I'm still learning how like even though I try to walk the walk and talk the talk when it comes to plain language, the academic side just kind of spills out sometimes because that's how I was trained. Um, but I think finding like people that you really respect. There's somebody maybe some probably a lot of you know somebody named Jenny Reddish. She's a very um influential uh plain language and document design and UX person. Um her name full name is Janice Reddish but she goes by Jenny Gny I think. Um and she really does walk the walk and when you read her papers it makes it really clear that she really does like live and breathe plain language. So, um I think that that was really helpful for me to just like find people to like model myself after in a sense. What was the biggest difference? What was the biggest difference for you to to me? Oh, sorry. I think I got cut off there. Yes, Bill. Sorry. Yes. Sure. So, thinking about your your pasta, uh like like Sean said, there's a big translation, I think, or or shift for for audience. So my audience is public policy makers. So it's senior officers in the military. It's it's general officers. Um it's um combatant command um commanders and their staffs. Um it's uh senior executive staff um within the US government. It's um uh senior people at the state department. Um so people in the intelligence community. I have to be able to go to them and uh give them insight uh into the possible choices they could make. I have to help them understand if you pull different public policy levers what is likely to happen uh which leads to a second part uh because they don't want they don't want to know about meth I mean they want to know that there's rigor um but they don't want to know how sustained they don't want to hear like some crazy you know academic genre of like you know like introduction literature like that's just that's just crazy to them right they want to know what should I do why should I do it and what are the tradeoffs and can and I trust you. A second part of that, I think part of that trust, that ethos issue is that um I don't set priorities. Um my job is not to decide what we ought to do. Um I can as a scientist, my job is to help and my team and by the way it's never me. I work in interdisiplinary truly interdisiplinary teams of people. Everything is a group effort. um which helps produce more rigor I think by the way because we have many many people working together um who have very different kinds of uh methodological and domain knowledge expertise that intersect and um and that is we can tell people what we think is likely to happen and why and our relative certainty but I don't set uh priorities of government I don't set values I don't set us you know policy um and that there's a kind of humility uh I think in understanding that I am not if I want to do that, I should run for office. Um, and then the last part of that then for me is all that being said, I also have values. And so, um, I have no problem helping, say, the US military. Um, I don't want to work for homeland security and I don't want to do work. There's a whole I mean, maybe there would be something I would do. There's a range of activities for homeland security I don't want to do. And I'm lucky that I can pick and choose. Um, but that's I and I that's a really hard thing to navigate is this idea that like in business or in you know the public policy world um what do you do when you're asked to do work that you think might be misapplied or in my like my like I don't know my criteria is like look it I don't want to ever manufacture guns because guns are meant to kill. Um I know that a a Louisville slugger could be misused but Louisville sluggers are meant to for baseball so I'm okay with that. That's my That's my like metaphor for how to pick these things over. Yeah. Interesting. I I was going to um I was thinking about my own experience in in my company doing naming. We've been approached a couple of times by tobacco companies to name cigarettes and we've just turned that down like nope, we'll do a lot of things, but we like that's part of the line and we have a very short list of industries that we absolutely would not work for and that's that's one of them. So, um, that just speaks to again in industry you do get a little bit of the ability to pick and choose where you're going to work if you're able to. Um, so McKenzie, finally for you, what I want I'm curious as Bill was saying he works on a team. Do you work on a team as well? Do you often do that or do you work by yourself? Uh, both. In this exact moment, I am um I am leading a couple of different teams and that's the kind of consulting service that I'm providing. But um I have in previous roles you know worked on teams and that's something that I think um is two things I enjoy it and also uh fitting into a team sometimes designing a team working with teams these are skills that we can cultivate and something that that that really matters I think in working in this field. Um, and if I can, I want to draw a connection to to what Bill was saying in terms of values because I think this is really important for any kind of employment or engagement with the nonprofit sector. So these are organizations and institutions that have values that have values and we are people we have values too. And I think in looking for where you want to be in this field, it's important to seek out either seek out that alignment or if the alignment isn't there, figure out how are you going to deal with that and deal with what that looks like uh every day. And there are a lot of different and you know there are also a lot of different types of nonprofit organizations. And when I say types, I mean anything from like their tax and reporting structure and like legal requirements to even how it is that they if if we think of nonprofits as something that serve like what do they serve? So are do they do research? Do they do direct service? Are they about fundraising? Uh you know these are um there isn't a uniform kind of this type of organization. And so in looking if if this is a sector that someone wants to be a part of just knowing that understanding that and looking for looking for um that alignment uh I think is important and frankly can save you a lot of heartache and stress at other uh points in your journey too. And then um I also want to connect to this larger point of what the difference or what was different when I kind of stepped into this field. And two things were really important. So, one, knowing what it is that they're asking you for. Like when when someone comes to you knowing you're an academic or former academic, you know, they ask they might ask you questions like um what should my priorities be or should I do X or Y? And is that really something that you want to answer for them? you can so so you know knowing being able to spot the difference between what people are asking you for and what you can reasonably provide them so you can help them understand tradeoffs you can give them a sense of the wider history or story behind something there are different ways that you can answer people's questions and some of the way that I think about that is asking what service am I here to provide in if this is a labor market what service am I providing am I looking up stuff for you? Am I managing a project for you? Am I a writer? Am I reviewing somebody else's writing? Am I uh and and so I think that was a big difference. I think as an academic I was I I was a was slasham, you know, trained to go really deep on any question you ask me. Um, and you know, I can still do that, don't get me wrong, but that's not necessarily what I'm being asked for on a day-to-day. And so, what service am I here to provide is something that I uh ask myself a lot and had to learn uh how to ask myself. Yeah, it it sounds like especially for nonprofit, there's sort of two layers to it, right? There's the desire to want to work for a company that serves as you were saying, but then there's also layered on top of that. Well, what area do you want to serve in? You know, Sean has chosen um sort of law and public policy mixed together, whereas somebody might choose a different way to go depending on what that company might do. Um so, um let's stay with you for a second, Mackenzie. Can you, this is a great transition to some of the more practical advice. So, if somebody really wants to work at a nonprofit, what kind of advice, practical advice would you give them? Like, where do you look? Do you just Google for jobs or do you look on LinkedIn? Are there keywords that are really important to help you find opportunities that are out there? Obviously, there's networking, but if you're you're just getting started, maybe what are the top three things that you would do? Um uh I think that um you can you can in fact Google like nonprofit jobs. Um you can also um but I think even before you get there um uh I would say why why do you want to work at a nonprofit? And what I would be looking for in that why is is there a specific like issue or set of issues that you are um interested in? And if that's the case then um so if you are interested in you know let's stick with what's top of mind for me. If you're interested I want to work on a nonprofit that's focused on policing reform. Well, then that is a um that's a a more definable space and you can find uh roles that are in that space. Or uh if you want to be a um maybe you're not interested in a particular issue, but you're interested in fundraising. I want to be a fundraiser. So then your job search is about looking for jobs in development and and development offices. And so um and so that that's kind of one way to uh narrow the bounds of what you're looking for. So the first question I would ask is why? And then you know for anyone who is interested in who wants to specifically do communications or marketing work for nonprofit organizations and I say that because that's the space that I know the best. Then there are I think uh a big way that employment opportunities get circulated are through um different list serves. So one of them is called radcoms or which stands for radical communicators. And so that's uh a list serve of uh nonprofits and and circulating jobs that are about communications for like this kind of sector. So that's um uh I think one way you can kind of get a feel for what kinds of opportunities are circulating and I'll put the name of the list serve in the chat. Great. Uh Alex has also mentioned idealist.org which is a list serve for nonprofit jobs and orgs. Um and yep there it is. Now we have the link. Um I I know that people have often recommended usaob.gov for government jobs. Bill, is that like the the right place to go? Are there others besides that or is that it? Uh, I think actually LinkedIn can also be good. Glass Door can be good, but definitely I would use um uh the jobs.gov. Okay. And Sean, any others to add to that? Were there things that you found useful? You you said you had this spreadsheet of all these jobs. How did you find all those jobs that you applied to? Was it networking, Google searching, LinkedIn, all of the above? Um, well, a lot of those that were mentioned, I definitely use like LinkedIn. Um, what else? Indeed. I I set up like um an alert so you can like when when new jobs come up with certain keywords, then you can have them emailed to you. Um, besides that, I think yeah, I Googled a lot. Um, yeah, beside that, I don't think anything else. Okay. And I know that this is something that we hear all the time. Most of the jobs that that we all have don't have linguist in the title, right? No, nobody is hiring linguists for what we do, although linguistics is a core part of what we all do. So, what are the other words that you would look for? Obviously, language, right? Like if it says something about language or for McKenzie's area, it would be like marketing or branding or maybe copy or discourse anal might be discourse analysis. I'm not sure. So, um, do can you guys think of other words that might be specific when people are looking? So, they're typing into Google and they're going nonprofit job law. What comes next? What do you do to narrow that down? I I think um there are a lot of jobs are looking for a lot of institutions are looking for researchers. They're looking for different level researchers. They may specify analysts. Yeah. Or analyst. they often specify qualitative, quantitative, or mixed method. Um, and so while most of those jobs, they're used to sociologists, anthropologists, and um, psychologists. That's the three disciplines they're used to recruiting from for these jobs. But if you're a linguistic anthropologist, you're an anthropologist. Um, if you have social linguistics and ethnography training, that's, you know, those are that's close enough, right? So I think it's possible to translate and represent the the skills and the the methods that we learn also methodology right because like being having method skills and domain knowledge is important being able to design a research uh study and to do methodological coherence in in research activities that is a non-trivial skill and important as well and so being able to represent that in your work I think is important. Cool. Um, Sean, other thoughts? I definitely sympathize with people conflating like being a polyglot with being a linguist because like even within my family, they're just like, "Oh, how many languages do you speak?" Um, so yeah, I definitely ran into that problem. Uh, definitely research. I think that's how I found my job. Um, I started to uh try to like pick up other skills after I graduated or even toward the end of my um before I graduated. I tried to learn some programming. That didn't really pan out for me. I became interested in UX a little bit. So, I started reading a little bit more about UX and I found that it was kind of compatible with what I valued in my graduate career like doing research and like speaking to people and understanding people. Um, I will say that I think especially during like a pandemic when most people at least when the job starts will start remotely um you should turn location off maybe a lot of times like um you'll put like your location and you really like narrow your um job search. So maybe just like not putting a location and sometimes it'll be like based in Seattle when you're in New York, but it'll be entirely remote and the filter doesn't catch that. Um and then also analyst. I definitely used um that as a search term, too. Yeah, that's great. Thank you. That that's all really good. Laurel, Laurel, can I give one more sort of job thing? Oh, absolutely. So um if I when I tell my students to get ready for for the job market, I tell them more than anything else being having high quality method method skills and being able to articulate that plausibly. I can do because like look when you're when you hire somebody like no one wants to it's going to be hard for you to find someone else to hire you because you care about like sustainable food sources. That's just not what someone wants to hire you for. but they want to hire you to do mixed method analysis, to do data visualizations. This is a a lot of things. It's like filling a roster slot on like a baseball roster. So, the more skills you have that you can sort of give evidence that took coursework, I I have like a portfolio, I did a publication on this kind of stuff, that's valuable. The second thing, and this is this is hard because um we have interests, we have things we passionately care about. What I've seen is that um like my dissertation was on how um how Marine US Marine Corps officer acculturation wistically affects their um political representation and their interactions with Congress. It was really easy for people to see how my work would translate to other public policy issues. I've had friends that did research that was very important to them and they loved and cared about, but it looked um it did not translate outside of the academic work. it it looked like and I I want to be careful. I heard the word though I've heard people say I don't want to hire someone that's doing me me search and I want and again I want to be careful about that because we have passionate you know feelings and values and this research we can do things that don't directly translate to other areas and see how they add to human knowledge and do bear fruit. But if you want to get hired for a nonprofit that wants to hire you to do X Y and Z they may not see that. So that's that's an important consideration over that's great and oh sorry go ahead to add um I just in um in uh thinking about how it's a whole other kind of study to think about how the different types of positions that are available get framed and presented and so I think a lot of organiza or many organizations also in the nonprofit sector like they are looking for researchers they're looking for analysts. Um, and sometimes those positions are like to to Bill and Sean's point like looking for positions that say like research analyst, mixed methods research analyst uh you know that's important too. There are also organizations that have borrowed the organizational structure um of like uh consulting organizations. And so you'll see positions that are offered in this associate, senior associate, principal, uh uh different types of program officers kind of of framework, too. And so those are all different types of positions that you could be um looking for. And so um and of course there's also like this the piece of the sector that is nonprofit consulting and not just borrowing the organizational structure of consulting firms. Um so that's other positions to be on the lookout for too. That that's great. And and this leads into something that I I think people would love to know given that a lot of the folks who are attending today are students. They're still working through their degree program whatever that is. Do you have specific recommendations for coursework that they should take to give them these skills? So obviously um whatever kind of courses will give you some research opportunities or um analytics or statistics or or things like that. Are there other courses? Obviously dependent on what your interests is. So if you were really interested in law, it might be good to take some courses that will give you a grounding in that. Are there other sort of pan uh interest courses that you would recommend people take while they're still um working on their degrees? Uh anybody can go. Yeah. So I would say uh data visualizations. If you can learn to do Tableau or some other way of representing data usefully, that's incredibly important skill and really would make you stand out of crowd. Another one is coding skills. if you can learn Python or R. Although I would I my my general sense is that R is more for the person that does their own ad hoc mad scientist work on their laptop. Python is more amendable to enterprise level sort of but that's my my best sense but if you can do web scraping with Python if you can build m simple machine learning kind of uh kind of models if you can handle uh data at scale uh using Python or other coding means that's important. So I think anything that shows that you can handle data in a world where we are getting more and more data on uh available to us is going to help you differentiate yourself. Yeah, that's great. And I would say even if you um I completely agree those are the things that I also would name and for anyone who might be having palpitations about ohg I have to learn how to use our like I tried it once it didn't really go well that's okay. Um what another thing that is important is being able to this gets back to the question about teamwork. Can you work with someone who is the R, if we're using R as an example, the R expert here, can can you work with that person? Can you work with the um the output of of the R script that someone else on your team is creating? And that is a skill that you pick up in these kinds of classes and and coursework as well. So it's not that you, you know, need to be the the the best, you know, programmer out there, but can you work with can you can can can you work on the team? That also really matters. And um is something that um one you can be you can speak to in interviews and and and frankly that's a question that someone people are looking for. Not just the person who's the expert, but the person who can work with the expert and someone will ask you it's okay in an interview to say I'm not, you know, an expert at this, but I'm familiar with applying it in these ways. That's a skill, too. Sean, anything to add to that? Yeah, I think Mackenzie's point about like I have that anxiety about learning coding like, oh, I don't know. I've spent hours and hours on this code academy course and I still don't know anything about it. But I do. I know more than I did before I started and that's probably hasn't yet but I imagine that will come in use one day. Um and besides courses I think like for me that um plain language conference I went to was really um that really like started it for me if there was like a moment where it started. Um, and if you're still in grad school, there's a good chance that there are a lot of things going on on your campus that maybe there are 8:00 in the morning on a Friday and you don't want to go. But you you might want to think about like going like saying yes to as many of those types of opportunities because once you leave grad school then you really don't you're not on the same email lists anymore and you're just not going to um have those like this was back before the pandemic but like when you hear things in the hallway and stuff and oh there's a conference you see a flyer for something um those are I think uh besides course work I think saying yes to those types of things are usually And then also asking for like money from your program if you can. Like um there were cases where I wanted to I went to a conference in Austria and the program funded that and I wouldn't have gone if it weren't for that. So seeing like what funding is available if you are in that type of grad program. If they'll pay for you to go to a conference then definitely go. Yeah. You have to ask. They're not going to offer to you. You got to ask. Exactly. One one other thing um and it may not be a course but uh the ability gaining and demonstrating um leadership expertise. So I'm a principal investigator um I you know I for most projects as I go from half a million dollars to $2 and half million dollar budgets. I have teams of people that work for me and while I'm a senior person I started off as a task leader then you know uh be a co-PI and then finally a PI. So if you can show um through other experience through demonstrator work somewhere in your academic career that you are capable of leading teams uh of of people to collaborate productively that's pretty powerful for some of them that want to hire. Totally agree. And I would add one more thing to that which is if you have the opportunity to take a course that helps you with your presentation skills do that. And I mean both standing up in front of a group of people and learning how to talk if you don't do that already, if you don't have the teaching experience, but also putting together a really kick-ass PowerPoint presentation because you need to know how to do that. You really do. To take all this data, to distill the points to it, to put it into a presentation that is pleasing to look at, that people can understand, and that is likely going to be handed around without you there to explain it. And that's something it took me a long time to learn. We're sort of used to voicing over our work all the time as we're presenting like in this kind of format where you're giving a paper and you're talking through slides. You really really have to figure out how to get it into a format where people can read it and understand it and not come away confused. And um I know a lot of universities have classes, but even you can take classes like that on LinkedIn and there's other free places that will teach you how to do it. It's not easy. like PowerPoint skills are harder than you think they are and having that in your pocket is fantastic. Uh we have a question from the audience here which is do you usually need to submit writing samples for the kinds of jobs that you all have on this panel? Uh, is it too late if during our academic career we haven't done much research that would be applicable or interesting to employers? Like if we have had relevant coursework or believe we have skills but none of the research writing we have produced is appealing outside of theoretical linguistics uh thoughts on that. Yeah. So like I I had to do a job talk where I presented research in a way that was um of interest that showed both my academic and and scientific chops but also showed I could translate and talk to a policy audience which is which is not easy and part of my uh application was also a writing sample. I think the writing sample you know they'll there it's very it doesn't have to be like about the place you're applying to. It's because you can see hey someone can write rigorously they can you know they can do good work. Um, but I guess you you know like it's probably going to be hard if you've done like something like um I like a humanities piece or fiction not translate well. But I think it has to be the the exact you know um subject area you're applying for. Okay. Yeah, it definitely doesn't have to be the exact subject area and it can also be um you can use the things that you have written and and maybe reformulate them. So you know for example like yeah I wrote a dissertation. I do not send that never have sent that whole thing to someone but I have sent people a uh summary of one of the turned one of my chapters into a one-pager. Right? So that that's a writing sample. I wrote it giving you a sample. Voila. Um so so but but in in all seriousness the uh it doesn't have to be the exact subject matter. You can um and when people are asking you for a writing sample you you can create different types of you likely have created different types of products like written products across your career and so uh and across your your academic career. And so I think maybe thinking a little more expansively about what have I written, what different formats are out there. Um and honestly if you are unsure uh about you know uh uh what you want to send, send things of different types and um you you can you know you can send them to things too. That's great. Sean, anything else on that topic? Yeah, I thought it was funny like the idea of setting like a se like 100page uh dissertation is quite a flex and no one's going to read it anyway. So that's pretty good advice. Um for me I so part of what we do at Center for Civic Design is we design forms like more accessible forms and we take insights from good design and plain language to make forms easier to read and harder to mess up basically. And when I was interning at this uh office for justice initiatives, my boss who was um a law clerk basically said, "We're working on this form. If you want to take a stab at it, go ahead. We probably won't use whatever you come up with just because there's like a very long legal process that you will you'll be long gone before any of this even gets talked about, but if you want to go ahead and take a stab at it." And so I did and I gave it back to him and we really never talked about it again. and I kind of forgot about it. And when I applied for my job, part of the job description was like looking at forms and I was like, "Oh, I did that." And I I it's definitely better than the original form, but I didn't really like I basically kind of jumped in the deep end with form designing and I knew I was like interested in it, but I didn't really know how to do it. So, I just like took a stab at it. So maybe I'm like reframing the question as like um what writings not what writing sample should you send but like what should you write like maybe if you're interested in blogging write some blog articles because that is a skill and that could be really useful especially at a nonprofit where they're looking for really diverse skill sets. I don't do blog writing but I wish I did because there are seven people at CCD and one of us has to do it. Nobody specializes in that. So things like that, like maybe if you have like this inkling of like I want to write that type of thing or like McKenzie said like a a summary, like that's a really good skill, like being able to summarize something and people will not only look at like the content of what you wrote in that summary, but also like, oh, that's really great that they can take something that's like several hundred pages and condense it to one page. Yeah, that's great. That's great advice. I I would I always say to people just write like keep writing because you get better at it the more you do it and the more writing you do the more writing samples you'll have and the more different types of writing you do the more fluent you'll get in them so you should always be writing something I think as we're starting to wrap up I wanted to ask you guys because I'm sure this is a top of- mind question for our students what are prospects looking like for jobs and nonprofits given our extremely turbulent times uh any you know inklings on that. Um, go ahead. You know, I there are I have an inkling. There are lots of different inklings and um I and I think that uh different I think um I understand why there is uh trepidation but at the same time um you know there there are still opportunities. So I I am not a person who thinks and sees that there's uh a jer of of opportunity and hiring. From where I sit, I see that it's happening and people are um uh creating new roles or looking to fill existing roles. I see a lot of of jobs out there and in you know all of the different platforms that we've discussed and the listers we've discussed like you know as as I've been sitting here I've gotten three open job opportunities through the radcom's listister that I mentioned. So you know on a Sunday people are saying that that that uh there are jobs available. So to answer your question, I think there there is a lot of opportunity. Um I and I I think there's a lot of opportunity. I think it will continue just based on the evidence that I kind of see in my inbox. That's great. Bill, you were going to go. Yeah. So um I would say there are still opportunities available, although I I think it's gone down. I mean, I've definitely seen I know that most of the FFRDC's, the fedally funded research development corporations, the large, you know, sort of partnership ones, um, in the DC area, I think all of them have shed some labor right now and I think there's more target I think there is hiring. I think it's very targeted. So, um, you know, like they hired me. I'm like some cookie guy with a rhetoric degree. Like I like the I have like the dumbest, you know, PhD in the world. I got hired kind of on a flyer. it worked out. Um I I see now people with data skills sort of like like skills that people can absolutely see fill the uh like affect the bottom line and are going to help them be productive either pulling in money or effectively meeting um their car obligations. So again, I think that speaks to wanting to make sure there's opportunities. You really want to make sure one that you are able to plausibly present yourself as having valuable skills and two really thinking carefully about how you represent yourself uh so that you're speaking and like I think you might have five different eight different CVs. You might really really I mean really think carefully about crafting every single cover letter piloting it with people. So contacting people, the last thing you want to do is send a cover letter that signals something that's the wrong thing. You you have the best intention, but you didn't use the language and the framing and the even the order, the scheme that's going to make sense. So I just think you have to really take take your shots very very carefully, thoughtfully, with a lot of diligence, uh, and make the most of them over. That's great advice. Great advice. Um, Sean, and what about in your sector? What do you think public policy uh you know civic design stuff? So center for civic design's uh bread and butter is elections. So definitely not an uh not a boring like uh field right now and there from what I understand is a lot of funding happening right now. I didn't know any of this going into it. I didn't really know anything about elections before I worked at CCD. So I think that just going back to like networking that's like probably a good question to ask when you are networking when you do connect with people like what what is it like what is it like compared to a year ago what how much has the pandemic like impacted this for some fields the the pandemic has like made things better for some fields right and it's kind of like a weird irony but that's just the reality in some cases and I hate making this point because I think it's so unfair. But I think that um like taking unpaid internships is I mean I I I was able to do that. My wife was working while I finished my graduate degree. So I hate like pushing that because I I hate that idea of like unpaid internships. I think it's really um it's unfair to put it lightly. Um, but I did it because I was able to do it. So, if you can do it, then you should. And if you can't, then I sympathize with how unfair that system is. Yep. Totally agree. Totally agree. So, we are just coming up to time. Uh, this has been an amazing conversation. Uh, you guys have been fantastic and I thank you so much for your time. Um, I think they're going to shut the room in a second. So, uh th this has been recorded and we are going to be making it available at some point for um people outside of the attendees for LSA. The LSA attendees will get to view it uh I think on the LSA website. We've been linking in the chat all the different resources that we have. We've got the career panel tomorrow and then the mixer which is on Wednesday. And uh if some of you are going to attend the mixer panelists that is I'm sure there would be lots of people who would love to talk with you and I would bet you're going to be getting LinkedIn requests from lots of the folks who attended today. So again thank you so much for your time. This has been fantastic and we are lucky to have you as our panelists. [Music]