During this year's Fund Drive, we want to take a moment to reflect on the impact that the LINGUIST List has had on its staff--past and present. Today, we're spotlighting a former LINGUIST List staff member, Clare Harshey Treutel.

Clare reflects:

Dear LINGUIST Listers,

My name is Clare, and I’m an alumna of the LINGUIST List. I edited the jobs, supports, internships, and reviews areas between 2016 and 2018 while working on my MS in Computational Linguistics at Indiana University. I am writing you today to update you on the impact that those few years had on my life, and the impact your money has when you generously donate to the LINGUIST List.

After my time as an editor, I went on to work as a computer scientist specializing in machine learning and information retrieval. My linguistics background has often been unusual among my teammates, but it has also been a major advantage. Language is everywhere, and affects everyone. Understanding the mechanisms of human language is key to all kinds of scientific, business, legal and logistics problems. Even when working with non-language data, I have often relied on my education in linguistics to recontextualize a problem as if it were about language, coming up with an out-of-the-box idea for a new way to approach the data.

After five years of this kind of work, I decided I wanted to further refine my professional specialization. Last year, I began working on a PhD in Biomedical Informatics at the University of Cincinnati and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. Here, too, my linguistics background is unusual among others in my program, who often previously studied computer science, biology, or engineering of some kind. But I am thankful again to be the odd duck - to have the holistic perspective that my education in linguistics has afforded me. In a world where transformers and large language models generate an awful lot of hype, it’s more important than ever that we see language as, first and foremost, a human phenomenon. It is still critical to understand grammar, dialectal variation, sociolinguistics, and more - not on a mathematical level, but on a truly linguistic level. So while large language models are revolutionizing the possibilities, I still believe that the field of linguistics is critical for the future of ethical and intelligent science.

My time at the LINGUIST List allowed me to become the scientist and student that I am today. I’ll forever be grateful for the opportunity to study at IU, to help facilitate our website and mailing list, to interact with many of you, to develop awareness of our field and to develop my love for linguistics. My years as an editor were truly special to me, not least because the LINGUIST List is such a special organization.

To those of you who donated in the past, thank you from the bottom of my heart for your generosity. And if you haven’t yet donated, please consider doing so to support the LINGUIST List, the vital role it plays in our field, and the hard-working students who keep the whole thing running.

Sincerely yours,

Clare Harshey Treutel
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The LINGUIST List needs your help! Please help us continue providing our services by making a donation to our Fund Drive at https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate.