Career & Tools
Check out this UCSB series on grad student and postdoc professional development experiences funded by the Individualized Professional Skills (IPS) Program. This week's featured video is by Giorgia Troiani, a graduate student in Linguistics, who used the IPS funds to attend a week-long school connecting academics studying Linguistics to industry representatives focused on language technologies. Read on to watch the video and learn more about the IPS program!
Have you ever wished you had support to take advantage of a professional or career development opportunity that lies outside the scope of your academic research? The UCSB Individualized Professional Skills (IPS) Program is designed to help graduate students and postdoctoral scholars fill in the funding gaps for pursuing opportunities that support your professional development in a variety of career trajectories.
IPS Insights: In our series, "IPS Insights," previous awardees share about their IPS-funded experiences in short informational videos. This week's featured video is by Giorgia Troiani, a graduate student in Linguistics.
Giorgia used the IPS funds to attend the LITHME training school connecting academics studying Linguistics to industry representatives focused on language technologies. Watch the video to learn more!
In Giorgia's Words: What I Learned
"The LITHME training school is a week-long event that brings together a variety of language specialists, linguists, and Natural Language Processing experts from the European Union. The school aims at connecting academics with industry representatives to create a space for the ethical advancement of language technologies. The school featured workshops on the contributions that different subfields of Linguistics could bring to language technologies, panels with industry representatives, and networking events. The workshops gave space to those more humanistic areas of the field that are less organically integrated with the language tech industry. Participants with diverse backgrounds were asked to collaborate in finding solutions to real life industry problems by applying their unique expertise. I particularly appreciated the panels where industry representatives introduced their companies and discussed job opportunities for linguists outside of academia. As someone who is pivoting into a computational environment from a humanistic background, I often struggle with identifying ways in which my research expertise could be applied to the industry. Attending the LITHME school gave me the opportunity of identifying new career perspectives and of discussing my profile directly with people who hold positions of interest. The school also helped me identify concrete steps to follow to pursue a non academic career. The networking events placed me in contact with potential employers and helped me create connections within the European job market."
IPS Program Overview
Awards up to $1000 are granted to eligible UCSB graduate students and postdoctoral scholars from any discipline who wish to individually tailor their career paths with outside professional development opportunities. The purpose of the IPS program is to help grad students and postdocs take greater agency in their own career path by funding exploration of a range of professional development opportunities across a variety of career and skill interests.
The IPS Program is a collaboration between the Professional Development Series at the Center for Science and Engineering Partnerships; Graduate Division; the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; UCSB Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative and CNSI Technology Incubator; Career Services; UCSB's divisional deans; and external donors. Learn more about the program here!