First Semester of Graduate School

Hey Lucien, What's Your First Semester Like?

Hi everyone! I know it's been a little while, but I'm back! This summer was rather interesting, but I will save that for another post.

It's offical, everyone! I am in my first semester of the Computational Linguistics Masters program at Tulane. If you know me, you know that I've been working towards doing Computational Linguistics somewhere for a LONG time - since tenth grade of high school. It seems really bizzare that I'm actually here, and doing it, but I wasn't going to give it up either. I'm incredibly proud of how I was able to pull myself up going from academic probation my very first semester of college to Dean's List both semesters of my last year of undergrad. I didn't have much help during the process, but I can now officially say that I've made my parents proud. :)

Now it's time to answer the question: What is my semester like?

Well, first, let's talk about classes. I'm taking four classes this semester, a much lighter workload than I ever had in undergrad. It's even better now that I'm not doing band, but of course the work is much more difficult. In Linguistics, I'm taking Semantics and Pidgins and Creoles, and for Computer Science, I'm taking Intro to Data Science and Intro to Machine Learning. Honestly, the Machine Learning class deserves its own subsection on my blog with the amount of planned content I have coming up for it, but that'll come in time. Semantics is a really interesting course for me to be taking, and I'm excited for the opportunity to explore more computional applications of Semantics. This area of linguistics is rather logic-based, which seems to lend itself well to computational studies. One thing, however, that I don't like within my linguistics courses is the focus on English. Of course, English is the common language my classmates, professors, and the textbook have with one another, but I ache for the opportunity to take a dedicated course in African Linguistics. One detriment, also, is that all of the linguistics professors at Tulane are white. We do have a Ph.D. student, my semantics professor, who is Black and a native speaker of Yoruba. The professor with the greatest knowledge of African languages, Dr. Orie, recently passed away. She will be missed immensely. With this mention of the whiteness of the Tulane Linguistics Department comes the next ling course that I am taking, Pidgins and Creoles. The course is also one of great interest, as I have personally not seen any discussion of NLP for Creoles or Pidgins, and this is one way that I am able to ensure my studies, though tech related, are intersectional. Pidgins and Creoles have an extensive history with colonization, slavery, Africans in the Diaspora, and this is another major reason I am in this course. Of course, however, I am the only Black student in the class (the other Black student was in it for a week and then dropped it... I wonder why /s). Let's just say that this is an awkward class to be in.

My computer science classes are another beast. Let's first talk about my data science class, since that one (so far) isn't too bad. We spent a lot of time getting set up in our software, but we've been moving into discussions about statistical analyses and slightly into modeling. This is what I am looking forward to the most since in this class, I am going to be refining my Trans* Twitter project. I want to be able to throughly understand how to do the statstics to make my research valid and know how to choose a good model (and what even makes a good model), which I feel like this class will teach me in a way that is actually applicable. My biggest problem with my previous computer science classes is that there wasn't anything tangible that we were creating, it was also just theoretical. I like Data Science because I feel like I'm actually getting things done! This is also why HTML and CSS are actually fun, but they're not as intuitive for me, lol. My machine learning class, however, is one heck of a class. My professor is extremely smart and has a lot of mathematical knowledge, which is something that he is emphasizing. A lot. More than half the students who started in the class have dropped, which is very worrisome, but there wasn't much else I could take... However, we are doing a lot with different algorithms, and so I am planning on talking about them and my understandings of them, as well as applying it to some Data Science problems to make what I am learning so far feel useful.

Finally, it's time to talk about my work on campus! I am a graduate assistant in two places on campus - Newcomb Institute, where I am a Project Manager/Product Developer for the Digital Research team, and the Office for Gender and Sexual Diversity. In my role at Newcomb, I am spending a lot of time communicating with faculty and New Orleans community members who are the owners of several projects. I am specifically working on 5 projects, which I definitely will end up posting about and should talk more about my experience as a project manager. I also delagate tasks to the interns in order to meet the goals of the project owners, and honestly, I have found myself struggling a little with how to adequetely deligate tasks. If I am still struggling by our next sprint, I will set up a meeting with my manager to talk about this, because I want to make sure the students are able to feel like they have accomplished their work for the sprint while understanding that a lot of the work we're doing is ongoing. In my role in the Office for Gender and Sexual Diversity, I am mainly managing social media, coordinating graduate queer events, and working on a language resource for queer and trans terminology. I also am planning on finally taking up the project I wanted to work on pre-COVID, which was to improve language accessibility on campus. Tulane itself is not a very accessible campus. Many buildings don't have elevators, many sidewalks are impossible to navigate, and there are not nearly enough gender neutral restrooms on campus (though I suppose I should be greatful we have any). Further than that, I do not believe we provide access for blind students, so this is something that I am planning on verifying and working on.

Well, that was rather long, but this is my semester so far! I forgot to mention that there was a hurricane the second week of school that knocked power out of the whole city, lasting a minimum of two weeks for some areas and almost a month for others, but that would've been too chaotic. Thanks for reading, friendos, and I'll see you on the flip side!