My name is Miles Conlan and I graduated
in December of 2015 and with a major in
linguistics and two minors one in TESL
and one in Spanish. My time studying
linguistics was a little shorter than
some other people switching from
engineering and just kind of dove right
in but had a lot more fun doing the
Linguistics program because it was so
interesting. I run my own business and
for my business I actually use a lot of
technology as well and so I went through
a little bit different of a track in the
Linguistics program where I helped a
professor do research and we use a lot
of programming and different software
that helped prepare me for the job
I'm doing now which is being
technologically heavy so develop some
software to be able to manage my
business but participating in the
research was really cool and there was a
wide variety of things that I could do
for some of the research that I ran
across but the professors were also all
super helpful in getting me to explore
my interests and there's phonology and
phonetics there psycholinguistics
sociolinguistics I did more software
side stuff and and natural language
processing and data mining and all that
and all of those fields so it's a
surprisingly versatile field to go into
which you wouldn't really expect but so
I was able to really focus on my
interest more particularly in software
and pronunciation to be able to dive in
and get to get to explore those fields
which has actually helped me in what I'm
doing now especially on the software side.
That experience learning some
programming languages that I used in my
linguistics degree had prepared me to learn other
languages that are perhaps more useful
in exactly what I was doing but getting
me familiar with how programming
languages work as well as human
languages work was I think a big focus
of my linguistics degree as well so it
well prepared me I think for for going
out on my own and starting a business
and having that technology foundation as
well when I decided to do that.
