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How many opportunities are there for a linguistic major in Massachusetts, specifically Boston.

#linguistics #language #boston #Massachusetts

language linguistics boston massachusetts
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David’s Answer

Hi Kilbert,

I think, in any major metro city, there are going to be tons of opportunities for any career choice. I think you should think less about "opportunities for a linguistic major" and more about specific jobs you'd want to do. There's a lot of career paths in any given major, so it will be a lot easier to find places that have more openings in your specific job field once you've picked a few careers that you'd be certain you'd want to investigate.

David recommends the following next steps:

Narrow down your list of career paths you'd consider, and then do a job search on a job site like Indeed or Monster for a specific job, rather than a field of jobs. There may be a ton of jobs in linguistics in an area, but if they aren't jobs you'd want to take, the total number of available jobs doesn't really matter.
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John’s Answer

Hi Kilbert, I think one thing you'll need to do first is narrow down how you want to use a linguistics degree. For example, Boston has several companies which employ computational linguists, who do natural language processing work, which could include teaching AIs how to translate languages accurately. If you want to go into applied linguistics (a very broad field), there are opportunities for interpreters or translators, especially in the court system. There's also developmental linguistics, and there are several university jobs (especially in MIT's linguistics department) where you could work as a research assistant in a lab setting, helping to gather and code data from children learning to speak their first language(s). These are just a few examples. Once again, I highly recommend deciding on the field of linguistics you want to study, and then you can find possible jobs from there. Hope this helps!
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Perri’s Answer

Hi Kilbert!

There are many different careers that a linguist might have:
- Teacher or professor
- Speech Language Pathologist (SLP)
- Occupational Therapist (OT)
- Audiologist
- Technical Writer (writing software manuals for non-technical people)
- Software Engineer
- Translator

It depends...
- Do you want your work to be about therapy, helping others with speech and language difficulties? If so, consider SLP.
- Are you interested in hearing, or even music? Consider audiology.
- Do you like working on a computer to run experiments and solve problems? Consider engineering and software development.
- Do you like teaching others? Consider going into education.
- Do you like learning languages, and logic? Consider translation or coding.

Linguistics opens up opportunities to work in well-defined, professional roles such as SLP and OT. It also opens up a world of possibility in technology - there are linguistics who work at Bose (the headphone company, based in Massachusetts!), Google, Apple, etc.
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