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superlinguo · 4 years

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Linguistics Jobs: Interview with a Community Outreach Coordinator

I often talk about the time I spent working in community radio. Not because I worked there very long (it was only a few hours a week in my final year of undergrad), but because it was a very formative experience, it still influences the way I teach, and the importance of communicating my research to different audiences. In today’s interview, Olivia Fava also shares my enthusiasm for radio. You can follow Olivia on Twitter (@o_fava).

What did you study at university?

I attended McMaster University in Hamilton (Ontario, Canada). Fun fact: I actually started my university career in the chemistry/physics stream! I didn’t know what linguistics was in high school while I was deciding my major, but I realized pretty quickly that the sciences weren’t for me. Once I learned about linguistics, I realized it would be a perfect fit and switched over in my second year of university.

I took a broad range of courses in my first couple of years, but by my fourth year, I had concentrated the most on semantics and pragmatics. Linguistics majors at my university are also required to study at least two languages from two different language families; I studied Japanese, Italian, and American Sign Language (ASL). I also spent a semester on exchange in Japan in pursuit of my language credits, which worked out well because it was both a great experience and one that was very useful towards my degree.

I graduated this past June, but I’m currently working at my university, so I’m still continuing to take linguistics courses that I didn’t have the time or space to take while I was a full-time student. I’ll be starting a course on programming for linguists soon, which I’m very excited for.

What is your job?

I work at my university’s radio station (93.3 CFMU), and my job title is Community Outreach Coordinator. I’ve volunteered there as a radio host for about three years now, so once I graduated I applied for a job and the rest is history!

Day-to-day, I host the morning show and do interviews on local news, culture, and politics. I also plan, oversee, and write and/or edit all of our other news and arts coverage, mostly articles or videos. Communications-wise, I manage a fair bit of our external communications and all of our social media. I also help train and supervise our part-time staff and volunteers. Our staff is small, so I end up wearing a lot of hats, but I’d say most of my work falls under the umbrella of media and journalism.

In a given day, I’ll most likely go from hosting the morning show, to training volunteers, over to editing articles, and then researching ideas for new articles or documentaries (and, of course, there’s always emails to answer in-between). It’s a very fast-paced job that demands a lot of creativity and adaptability. As a campus radio station, we’ve been moving a lot more into podcasting as well since that’s very popular with my generation, so I also spend some time on audio editing. With how popular podcasting has been recently, that’s experience I’m really glad I’m getting now!

How does your linguistics training help you in your job?

It helps me immensely! Being able to pronounce names more accurately in interviews is the one that non-linguists will immediately pick up on, but linguistics training also helps me in subtler ways.

I’m especially grateful for having studied semantics and pragmatics, because picking up on the finer shades of meaning words have can really help in interviews. Listening carefully to the words my guest uses and understanding presupposition and other speech acts really helps me understand precisely what they’re trying to convey, whether they’re experienced speakers or first-time interviewees. It also helps me pick up on how they feel about a particular topic, what they might be hinting at or not saying directly, and what lines of questioning I should explore more for maximum impact. And, most importantly, it helps me do all this quickly.

That quick linguistic analysis ultimately helps me come up with good, pertinent questions to ask as I am met with new information, which is a very useful skill for doing interviews. A secondary part of my job is also training other people on how to do interviews, so I definitely appreciate having the terminology on hand to really break down how spoken communication works.

The other thing about my job is how many different people I speak to every day. Studying linguistics has really helped me quickly grasp how a person speaks, and I find that I’m able to modulate my speech to ‘match’ them when necessary. It might seem like a small thing, but it can really help people feel more comfortable.

Also, linguistics has definitely made my writing more accurate and more interesting. My understanding of semantics, syntax, and pragmatics helps make my writing accurate, well-structured, and interesting. With regards to speaking on-air, I find it also helps me understand how to properly use verbal cues like emphasis. I write my own scripts for radio, a medium without visuals where you need to keep your audience engaged with just your writing and your speaking voice, so linguistics has been very useful for that.

Do you have any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?

I mostly just wish I had known about linguistics in high school. The dilemma for me was that I didn’t feel like I quite fit in with either sciences or the humanities. I was more oriented towards languages and literature, but the analytical framework the sciences appealed to me greatly as well. In short, I wanted to do analysis with words, something I didn’t think was even possible. I spent a lot of time in high school and early university worrying over finding the right major, time I don’t think I would have spent if I had known about linguistics sooner. Regarding university more generally, I really wish I’d been told more that changing your path is an absolutely natural thing to do. I always worried that I had a limited number of years to solidify my life path, so redirecting would mean I had “lost” those years I’d spent on whatever I was doing before. Once I adjusted my perspective and realized that life is more than just a single linear trajectory with set time limits, I became much more adaptable – and happier, as well!

Any other thoughts or comments?

Dear reader: if you’re like me and you appreciate both language and scientific analysis (and/or find yourself studying the etymology section of the dictionary in your spare time), you should definitely explore linguistics if you haven’t already. Even if it’s not as a major or career, it will probably a) fascinate and delight you and b) help you better understand how communication works, which can only serve you well in work, school, and life.

And if you are considering going to school for linguistics, I can tell you from my own personal experience that I’m very proud of my major, I can’t think of a single course I didn’t like, and although I’m just starting out in the working world, I can already see the massive benefits studying linguistics has had on my work. I’m very excited to see where my linguistics knowledge will take me in the future!

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