Summer Job, 2013 edition

[[Granted, most people close to me are well aware of this, so it’s not exactly breaking news. To be fair, it’s only been about a month since the job was confirmed. This post isn’t that far past its expiry date… unlike some of the other drafts I have in the works]]

I’m officially working at the University of Alberta for the summer of 2013! I’m part of the inaugural Canadian group of the University of Alberta Research Experience program. In particular, I’m working for the summer with Professors Greg Kondrak and David Beck on a project that was listed on Kondrak’s website. It is, in a word, awesome. It’s going to be great experience, and it’ll be awesome to have references from another university. Also, it means living alone in Edmonton, which I’ll talk about in another post.

But, for now, I’ll settle for talking about how I got the job. A life lesson, so to speak. Step 0 is to know that these kinds of opportunities exist - so you’ve got that one covered, dear readers. In Canada, NSERC and SSHRC have summer internships, the details of which vary from one school to the next - but the basic gist is you need to find someone with funding, and offer to work on something with them. The funding agency (or the school, if the program is like UARE) will cover most of the cost, and the professor pays a much smaller portion of your salary. It’s a pretty good deal for them, too.

For my job last summer, I got started just by asking the head of my department who had funding from those agencies. This year, I told my supervisor, Robert Biddle, that I wanted to work on something that would take me closer to computational linguistics. He racked his brains and realized that he knew of someone at University of Toronto who did work in the area, Gerald Penn, and helped me with my introduction and asking for a phone interview. We spoke, and Penn told me about UTRECS at UofT, as well as UARE. Unfortunately, the deadline was long past for UTREC, but I get the feeling most of Penn’s work isn’t really undergraduate-level anyway.

So then I googled “University of Alberta computational linguistics”, and found this page. The rest, as they say, is history.

And that’s how a plain old interview (which I fervently hoped would turn into a job interview) indirectly got me a job! Networking, y'all. Well, no, networking involves actually building a network. Audacity and asking questions, I guess.

Whatever you call it, the point is you don’t have to graduate from university without any experience. Continuing from above, here’s some steps to follow:

  1. Pick a thing you think might be interesting, like computational linguistics for me, even if you don’t know the first thing about it. You’ll learn as you go along.
  2. Then use the internet to find people working in the area, and send a really nice e-mail telling them how great you think they are.
  3. Tell the great person you’d like to work with how great you are. First, don’t lie. Second, tell them interesting and only slightly off-topic things like “I use Emacs” and “I think Haskell is cool”, which (in my opinion) make you sound genuine and help you stand out a bit. Third, if you’re lucky, have some kind of reference they can contact (can be as simple as mentioning who you’ve worked with before, and on what).
  4. Admittedly, Step 3 isn’t exactly a perfect set of instructions. Ask someone to look over your e-mail before you send it! They’ll tell you if you sound desperate. Hopefully. Consider asking another academic, like a professor of a class you took, what they’d like to hear in an e-mail from a random student.
  5. Don’t assume your first attempt will work out, or any of your attempts really. If you get multiple offers and they have conflicting deadlines, be clear with everyone involved where you stand - there was no problem with me saying “hey, I’ll accept this for now, but if I hear back from University of Alberta I’m going there”. Odds are they have backup candidates who are a bit less great than you, but will do an alright job anyway.

You probably won’t be so lucky as to find a professor with a webpage that says “hey, here’s things I’d hire you for” but they may still have something of the right size for four months of full-time work. If you’re feeling shy about contacting strangers, it may help to remember that if you do wind up working with them, it’s a mutually beneficial relationship. If it’s not going to work out, they probably won’t even reply, or they’ll just say “no” and not much more. And that’s okay!

Anyway, next time I’ll talk more specifically about the job and what it’s been like moving out to live on my own for the first time. Spoiler: I haven’t died yet, but on the other hand, I only ate two meals today. Oops.