Job

Hello!

So I recently accepted an offer for a new job, which I figured was blog-worthy even though it doesn't come with pictures. Here's the story.

My current job ends on March 31st, so I started looking for new employment in December. I was looking online and redoing my resume and also getting the workd out to my friends and contacts that I was on the lookout. One of my friends, who is a graduate student at NUS, where I work, is in my Syntax Interest Group that a few of us have weekly with my boss, Mohanan. I mentioned that I was looking for work and she is a teaching assistant and said that sometimes the department hired full-time teaching assistants, even for those who aren't graduate students. So, I emailed the head of the department. He told me that while they occasionally hired people full-time, they didn't have any space in the budget for that right now since they make the graduate students do it for free! But he did refer me to another person who was the head of my specific major that I'm working in (English Language). This person is someone I actually happen to know because I've read his work on Singlish and I sat in on his class a couple of times this semester. He asked me for my resume, just in case something came up.

A week or two later, he mentioned that there was a linguistics professor at the other major university in Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, who was looking for a research assistant. So, I looked up her email address and sent her a short email about me to say that I was interested. She asked for my resume, and then set up a meeting for me. The meeting was set for Friday, January 8th. So I was pretty much expecting an informational meeting. After all, we hadn't discussed any details. When I got there, me and Professor Tan really got along. (Of course, now she wants me to call her Ying Ying, which I will struggle with for a while I'm sure.) She told me about the project and I thought it sounded really interesting, and she asked a little bit about me, and then basically said she wanted to hire me!

I was very surprised because she hadn't really asked me too many questions. Turns out, it's not because of my sparkling resume that she was convinced to hire me. Actually, she is a previous student of my current boss, Mohanan, and she had happened to have dinner with him sometime between when I first emailed her and when we met up, and apparently he said very nice things about me. So, this is the second job I've gotten thanks to him! :)

The job is pretty technical and wide-reaching right now, and a lot of it is in the developmental stages. I'll describe it as briefly and interestingly as possible. We are looking at the phonology of Singapore English, and in particular the suprasegmentals, which are a certain subclass of sounds that are very hard to pin down because they're the less obvious sounds, not the things like "the difference between p and b", but more like, "whyat are the things that allow us to differentiate two speakers even when they say the same things?". Kind of. And in particular, we're looking at stress. Our focus is Singapore English, but to look into that we'll also be digging into Malay and several Chinese dialects. There will be a lot of detailed data collection and coding.

One interesting thing is that there are a lot of undergrads who will be helping with the nitty-gritty work, and one of my jobs will be to be supervising them. I'm super excited, because my last job didn't enclude too much in the way of human interaction.

One not-so-great thing is that NTU is further away from my house, as well as further away from downtown, further away from Dan, and further away from pretty much everything in Singapore.Oh well, you can't have everything.

So, that's probably more than you ever wanted to know about my job. (Unless you're a linguist...) I was going to end this post with pictures of me in my NEW GLASSES that I just bought a few days ago, but for some reason my pictures are failing to upload. (Although heads up--they look a lot like my old glasses...) So hopefully there will be visual documentation within the next couple of days. Also be looking forward to some pictures of food that I've been making in the last couple of weeks, some cool Japanese lanterns (for Dad) and a few other assorted interesting things.