“With a liberal arts background, I have learned to think about problems in multiple contexts—and this ability has helped me to get where I am today.”
Lives in: Boston, MA
Major/minor: Linguistics major, French minor, Honors College
What work looks like: “I work on the Machine Learning/Voice Assistant team for a tech company. Behind every voice assistant there are linguists who help with automatic speech recognition and spoken language understanding. I design textual data to account for variation within the English language, audio data sets to include a variety of voices, and pronunciation dictionaries to help the models better recognize human speech.”
What she loves about it: “My team and office are based in Paris, and my role allows me to foster my love of both French and linguistics, as we have many meetings in French. I love the cross-cultural dynamic of my workplace and am lucky enough to get to travel to Paris for work!”
What she gained from a liberal arts education: “It allowed me to explore different avenues as an undergraduate, which in turn helped me develop a multi-faceted approach to problem-solving. I can see the big picture and how smaller pieces of that picture are interconnected. In my current role, I manage many different workflows, and the multi-faceted nature of my job sometimes just feels like a continuation of my experience in the liberal arts. I also find that my perspective is sometimes different from that of the scientists and engineers. With a liberal arts background, I have learned to think about problems in multiple contexts—and this ability has helped me to get where I am today. Though I may not have the computational or engineering skills of the typical person in my field, I feel respected and valued because of the perspectives I bring to the table.”