Interview with work experience student: Caitlin Fox

SOLL is not only playing a leading role in language and linguistics research, but is also actively involved in providing opportunities for young people to develop interest in language research. Recently, SOLL took on Caitlin Fox, a work experience student from Cheltenham Secondary College. Caitlin was supposed to come on campus for four days. Unfortunately, before she started, she was identified as a household contact of a confirmed COVID case and was unable to attend campus. She worked remotely under the supervision of Dr. Debbie Loakes at the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL) and Allyra Murray at the Research Unit for Indigenous Language (RUIL).

Niles interviewed Caitlin about her experience at SOLL     .

***

Why did you choose to do your work experience at SOLL?

It was actually my mom’s idea that I work here and also because I think I might want to do university work when I’m older. I definitely want to go to a university, but I’ve also considered that I might like to work in one.

***

Could you tell me about your work at CoEDL?

I’ve been editing a research paper on voice quality that has been reviewed. There was quite a lot of feedback, including a lot of references that were missing from the bibliography. So my job was to      edit that paper and fix the things that the reviewers said that needed fixing. That really took me out of my comfort zone quite a bit. Some parts were hard, like at one point I had to make the references myself. I haven’t really done that kind of referencing. I just copied and pasted the URLs most of the time, but I’ve learned how to actually construct the references properly     .

***

How do you feel about this editing work?

It is interesting. But I think it would be more interesting if I were actually on campus rather than sitting in my room, typing away at a laptop. The paper actually contains a lot of really interesting content. Some of it I didn’t understand because I haven’t actually done much on it. There’s no class at school for linguistics, but it did have quite a lot of cool stuff that I haven’t actually considered or thought about before.

***

How about your work at RUIL?

I’ve been making word searches using a website called 50words.online. I’ve just been gathering 15 words from each language and then putting them into a word search generator. I’ve also been preparing Twitter word posts. I got a few words, for example, like the English word ‘fire’, then, I found the same word in four different Indigenous languages. Then they’ll put them together in a post.

***

So how do you feel in general after working at SOLL?

It’s been really cool. It would have been nice to be on campus, but I think my experience has been really interesting. I knew that linguists study language. That was the extent of my knowledge, but now I learned that they study stuff like vocal cords, voice quality and the sound of voice, as well as different Indigenous languages.

***

Does this experience have any impact on your future plan?

I haven’t really considered working at a university because I thought the only job at universities was  a lecturer. Now I have realized that there’s actually a lot of research that goes on at university. I found this really cool and I think I might consider working in a university in the future.

***

Thank you for sharing your experience.

Thank you.