Would you rather work in industry or academia?
Many linguists are faced with the decision of working in industry or in academia. The working environment is substantially different. Brainstorming with our colleagues, many of whom came to industry from academia, we produced this list of differences:
Industry:
Practical application of linguistics
Salary, flexibility
Tech & human resources
Team projects
'Good enough' solutions
Multitasking / complex process
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Academia:
Research & teaching
Tenure
Limited resources & funding
Individual projects
Strive for 'perfect' solutions
Focus on one project & teaching
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If industry sounds like an option for you, perhaps you should consider a job in computational linguistics, which involves work in areas such as speech technology, information extraction, text mining, machine translation, automatic summarization, etc.