Call for Applications: Humanities EXPLORE Undergraduate Research Fellowship with Linguistics Professor Rachel Walker, 2024-2024
We encourage work-study and non-work-study students to apply. This role requires work authorization.
Research Assistant: Syllable Structures in Dialects of English (Linguistics)
Application Deadline: Sunday, Januay 5, 2025
The Humanities Division and The Humanities Institute are excited to announce an experiential learning opportunity for undergraduates at UC Santa Cruz to work with Linguistics Professor Rachel Walker.
The Humanities Experiential Learning Opportunities in Research (EXPLORE) Program connects Humanities majors and minors to faculty-led research projects in the division. EXPLORE Fellows are mentored by faculty members to develop skills and knowledge to help them make an impactful intellectual or creative contribution to their field. Students gain practical experience and professional training that builds on their studies in the Humanities. At the same time, faculty benefit from students’ assistance and academic expertise.
About The Project
This research project is a scaffolded inquiry in connection with an investigation that Prof. Walker is leading on syllable structure in dialects of English (US English and Australian English). Syllables are a fundamental prosodic unit in language. The research focuses on words like ‘file’ and ‘hour’, which speakers tend to have difficulty classifying as one syllable in length or two. Probing the source of these difficulties will shed light on how consonants and vowels are organized into syllables in English and how this organization may vary within and across dialects. The undergraduate researcher(s) will annotate audio recordings of speech to assist in data analysis and interpretation.
Check out this team's research brief published during the 2023-2024 academic year.
Position Description:
You and another undergraduate researcher will participate in an international research team of members at UCSC (Prof. Walker and a graduate student) and collaborators in Australia (a faculty member and a post-doc, with international communication taking place over Zoom and email). The undergraduate researcher(s) will receive training in a variety of humanistic skills. Their participation in the project will begin with training on the ethics of human subjects' data collection, the experiment design, the scientific questions at stake, and background literature. They will be trained to annotate the data and participate in weekly research meetings.
RESPONSIBILITIES AND EXPECTATIONS
- Duty (5%): Human subjects research ethics training
- Duty (5%): Reading background literature on the research
- Duty (10%): Weekly research meetings
- Duty (80%): Acoustic data annotation using MATLAB
Required Skills, Knowledge, and Abilities
- You are a declared major or minor in a department in the Humanities Division, and you are in good academic standing. If you have proposed the major or minor, you can declare by the end of the academic year in June. [required]
- You have work authorization. [required]
- Knowledge of acoustic phonetics.
- Technical ability with acoustic software.
What You'll Learn
This scaffolded undergraduate research inquiry will provide an experience that fosters the learning and development of several humanistic foundational skills and career-readiness competencies.
In the context of this opportunity, undergraduate researcher(s) will develop critical thinking and problem-solving through their participation in data analysis and its interpretation.
- The research team structure and weekly research meetings will foster skills and competencies in communication, collaboration and teamwork, professionalism, effective interpersonal interaction, reliability, and time management.
- Undergraduate researcher(s) will also acquire skills in ethics and integrity by learning about human subjects' data collection and management of sensitive data.
- The technical training undergraduate researcher(s) receive for data annotation will provide transferable technological skills with audio analysis software. In addition, team-based brainstorming for data analysis will scaffold how to use new approaches and technologies for problem-solving.
- Interacting with team members about the research and its progress will contribute to project management skills, such as understanding and explaining the project’s rationale, design and execution.
Position Term: Fall Quarter 2024 with a possibility to extend into Winter & Spring
Hours: 10 hours/week
Compensation: $20/hour
# Positions Avaiable 1
Mentorship: You will work closely with and report to Linguistics Professor Rachel Walker. They will delegate tasks, review your work, provide coaching, and help you understand professional research. You will meet to check in at least once per week.
Apply By Submitting
- Your resume
- A short cover letter (no more than one page), answering these questions: Why are you interested in this position? How does your academic expertise and skillset prepare you for this role? What are you hoping to gain from this opportunity?
REVIEW these resume and cover letter resources to ensure you are a strong candidate!
- Address your cover letter to Professor Walker.
Once the application window closes, there will be an interview process with top candidates. This job is expected to start in early January 2025.
Please contact the EXPLORE Program coordinator, Kylie Rachwalski, at hum-experiential-learning@ucsc.edu with any questions.
The Mellon Foundation, The Helen and Will Webster Foundation, The Humanities Institute, and the UCSC Humanities Division generously support the Humanities EXCEL Program.
