So what do YOU do for a living?

[Red Devil]

why? for being a visitor to these forums, of course; everyone goes eventually. stick around and you'll see...

[Red Spot]

Or ... or you might the cause for others to go there .. isnt that so RD?

[Red Devil]

my therapist told me that you guys were the reason i was going

[Zenophas]

Hmm, that's strange. I thought you listed me as a foe.

I forgive quite fast.

And what do you attend therapy for anyway?

Mostly physical, mental and sexual abuse.

[forgottengames]

Mostly physical, mental and sexual abuse.

In that case, I feel with you. You're not alone. Not by a long shot. You aren't the only one here to have suffered such treachery.
I'm just glad you've found a way to mitigate such feelings thru beautiful works of art.
And thanks for "forgiving" me, that really brightened up my day!

[forgottengames]

Well, I don't get paid for any of the work I do.

I have a doctorate in applied linguistics but spend my day to day time as MrsGSH and mom to the lilGSHs.

If you had the chance, what career would you go after? A doctorate is nothing to sneeze at, even if it involves EIS.

[Axeminister]

I'm a Project Manager and Estimator for a AC and Heating company. My division does building maintenance.

[MrsGSH]

Well, I don't get paid for any of the work I do.

I have a doctorate in applied linguistics but spend my day to day time as MrsGSH and mom to the lilGSHs.

If you had the chance, what career would you go after? A doctorate is nothing to sneeze at, even if it involves EIS.

I enjoy both teaching and research. Currently, I do a GSH-funded research project maybe every other year. But I'd like to get back to teaching some time.

I was trained to become a tenured professor at a research university. Part of me finds that appealing, but I also know a lot of the BS that goes on in the process. I'm content with family life at this point. We'll see what happens in the future.

[Red Spot]

Even if you do want to chase down what you have a degree in, it doesnt always happen.
I'm a mechanical engineer (and thats 'just' my first education), yet I have never really worked as such as 6 months after finishing it the steel industry pretty much collapsed and has since then not been able to properly pick itself up, which made it difficult to get a job in that direction with just an education and no experience. 2 Years later and you cant even compeat anymore with the fresh shipment of students that hits the market.
So today I am a (technical) jack of all trades and make a living doing stuff I often pretty much taught myself. Its difficult to find a good job, however the job I have is again very hard to fill by somebody who hasnt got the broad experience I have.

[forgottengames]

Way to adapt, Red Spot. Kudos to you.

[sabrebattletank]

Well, I don't get paid for any of the work I do.

I have a doctorate in applied linguistics but spend my day to day time as MrsGSH and mom to the lilGSHs.

If you had the chance, what career would you go after? A doctorate is nothing to sneeze at, even if it involves EIS.

I enjoy both teaching and research. Currently, I do a GSH-funded research project maybe every other year. But I'd like to get back to teaching some time.

I was trained to become a tenured professor at a research university. Part of me finds that appealing, but I also know a lot of the BS that goes on in the process. I'm content with family life at this point. We'll see what happens in the future.

Way to go, MrsGSH. I'm getting my undergraduate in Linguistics now. I'm into theoretical linguistics, especially syntax. What are your areas of focus?

[MrsGSH]

@ SBT:

My primary interest is in language as a means for social interaction. I co-authored a book we titled the Interactional Instinct as an alternative to Pinker's Language Instinct arguing that instead of language being innate, language is picked up along the way to building and maintaining social relationships. That's the theoretical work I've done.

Empirically, I look at the structure of conversation as it is carried out in daily life, most recently, how mothers socialize their children to literacy. In the past I have worked with frontotemporal dementia patients examining their interactions with others in an attempt to better understand caregiver reports of social dysfunction.

Anyways, how are you enjoying your program of study? What's keeping you engaged in the topic?

[sabrebattletank]

I really like my program of study. I'm at a major university with a good program. One really neat thing I enjoy is learning tidbits of different languages. For example, I don't speak a lick of Chinese, but I can talk about the binding properties of the Mandarin word ziji. It's pretty empowering, actually, in its own way, to have this type of knowledge. It's also kind of a neat party trick to be able to provide a sentence that's ungrammatical in all languages, like *"John seems that it is likely to win" with the meaning that "John is likely to win" or "John seems likely to win" or something similar. I wish I went to more parties where that is useful, though.

It's also really interesting to see the parallels and differences between linguistics and computer science. For example, the binary tree is used in both disciplines but very differently. I have a suspicion that there is something about computation in general that lends itself to the binary tree; and since (bio)linguistics is (in one sense) a study of the computational properties of the human language faculty, it's not surprising that you'll see deep similarities between computation in computers and computation in the brain's communicative faculty. My own studies have focused on syntax.

I've written term papers on the behavior of anaphors (read: "reflexives" for the noninitiated) in Twi (A Ghanaian language also called Akan), Twi vowel harmony, and I'm working on one now on Across-The-Board constructions and WH-question formation. I have an interest in the langauges of West Africa specifically. I have some deep suspicions that aren't the most common and are probably wrong (eg: there is no reflexive, it's all just logaphora | there actually are no such thing as true "coordinate" structures in the syntax, the syntax has them subordinate in some way).

As far as what's keeping me engaged in the topic? It's certainly not the promise of a job after graduation, nor is it the big bucks. It's the fact that I can spend hours pouring over the stuff. Frankly, it's that I enjoy doing it in a way I don't enjoy other programs of study. I'll grab your book off amazon, it looks like a neat read.

[Nielk1]

Binary trees work well in computing because its 2 choice, 0 or 1.