My name is Carly Summerlot. I
graduated from Iowa State in May of 2013
with a double major in linguistics and
International Studies and a minor in
French
while I was at Iowa State I took
basically every linguistics class I
could just so I could get as much
background in linguistics as I possibly
could and one class that really helped
me determine where I wanted to go with
linguistics was Linguistics 101 and that
class had multiple people visiting and
talking about what they had done with a
linguistics degree and how they used their
linguistics degree for a future career.
And one person that came was a linguist anthropologist who documented endangered
languages in South America and this
really stuck with me I knew at that
point that I wanted to do something like
that I wanted to do documentation work I
wanted to work on endangered languages
and I started kind of working towards
that goal through the rest of my
undergrad degree but I wasn't really
sure how to get there so I ended up
going to grad school and getting my
masters from the University of Iowa
where I was able to take a field methods
class which helped prepare me for for
fieldwork and now I'm at the University
of Texas at Arlington and getting my PhD
I'm about to start my fifth year so I
should be graduating this upcoming year
and I am finally after eight years
getting to do language documentation
work in Indonesia which is great so I
actually worked on the island of Borneo
in Indonesia where I studied 13 under
and undocumented languages spoken only
in that area and I sit with speakers and
I record them and I gather data and I
live in this little village for about
four weeks sometimes six collecting data
for my dissertation and it's exactly
what I always wanted to do so hopefully
within this next year I will be
graduating with the dissertation all
about language documentation and
fieldwork. But I started it all here.
