Employed!

Language Lover is happy to report that after ten long months, she has finally found gainful employment.

It took much longer than I had expected, and was accompanied by far greater changes than I had envisioned, but all is well now. Yesterday, I got on a one-way flight to Boston, and on October 1, I'm beginning my new job on the technical staff of MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a research and development center that mostly does government defense work. My husband and two girls will be joining me in a few months.

Some highlights along the way...

I'd hoped, as previously mentioned, to make a career change to a language-intensive field, or at least a technical field where knowledge of language would be useful. It seemed like a possibility when I was recruited for a software internationalization position at The Mathworks, but I didn't get the job. However, during the interview trip I realized that I really wanted to move back to Boston, so after discussion with my family, I refocused my job search to the East Coast. I had high hopes of working at multilingual software company Basis Technology after initial enthusiasm from the CEO and recruiting manager, but in the end they decided that they wanted local candidates with direct experience.

I decided that in this economy it's too hard to make a career change (without a huge pay cut, anyway...I did get considered for an administrative position at Berlitz, but decided that was way too impractical), especially one that involves a cross-country move. Although doing language and linguistics work full-time remains my ultimate goal, I'm content to stay in the scientific and high-tech fields while I make progress in other non-professional areas of my life. And the Laboratory does have a Speech and Language Processing division; they wouldn't consider me without a Ph.D. in computational linguistics or something, but perhaps once I prove myself there I'll have a chance to explore it further. For now, I'm just grateful to be back on my feet and looking forward to all the new changes in my life.