Megan Galloway is a CLMS candidate for August 2012. In this interview, Megan discusses why she chose to change her career to Computational Linguistics and life as a student in the program.

Megan Galloway

What is your educational and professional background?

I have a BS in Computer Sciences from the University of Houston, and after college I worked as a software consultant in Austin for a couple of years. Most recently I've been writing credit card software for a major bank.

Why did you decide to go back to school?

I write banking software, but it is boring! I want to write software that will make a difference in the world. After working for big corporations I realized that overall my skills were benefiting a very small number of people. I'd rather put my time and energy into making software that will aid and expand how people around the world interact with each other. I found out about the program by accident years ago.

Why did you choose the Professional Master's in Computational Linguistics program?

The CLMS program at UW was exactly what I was looking for. I have been out advancing my career but was ready for a change. I wasn't interested in getting bogged down in academia, just someone to teach me what I needed to know to work in the field of Computational Linguistics. When I found this program I was sold; it is short, to-the-point, and has a very practical internship option.

Describe a project you have worked on in the program.

I had an interesting project in my phonetics class where we had to predict the errors of a speech analyzer software trained on English when we ran different languages through it. My group was given German, with a lot of gutturals and sounds you typically don’t have in English, so we had to predict where a language would get messed up.

How do you think this program will impact your future career prospects?

Working with language processing or translation is really appealing, but those opportunities were closed to me before because of my lack of knowledge in this field. I expect the information I gain in this program to completely redirect my career path.

What would you have liked to have known as a new student?

I think it's true of most grad programs that the first quarter is trial by fire, so to speak. I wish I'd made arrangements to quit my job so I could better focus on schoolwork. However, I survived, and it's been extremely rewarding.

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