Katrina Glerum

Home Undergraduate Program Life After the Department Katrina Glerum

BA in Linguistics, 1993
Designer of interaction architecture

Linguistics as a major at UCSC is analytical training as good as any you can acquire. As such, Linguistics is a natural pre-law degree, for example. But it ain't bad for Marketing either. Defending a syntactic theory to Hankamer, Chung or Aissen, is better training for how to win a proposal than most Marketing majors ever get.

For me, the Linguistics major was just one of what already seems a long line of unorthodox decisions. But my Linguistics B.A. has occasionally come in damned handy and eventually became the ideal degree for an aspect of business that I find fascinating today, namely designing interactive experiences.

After graduating from UCSC, I taught English in the Japanese countryside and until I got bored and moved to Tokyo. Jobs were scarce, but Linguistics helped me get two simultaneously. One was a job copyediting scientific research journals for a tiny publishing company. I was the only one in the company without a hard science degree, but I could make grammatical sense out of pretty much anything at that point, even Japanese researchers describing semiconductor fabrication technology experimentation in their best written English. The second job was as a freelance linguist doing naming for an international branding company.

A couple of years later, I had to design, translate and localize a corporate website for Merrill Lynch Japan. A linguistics degree was incredibly useful during this process. For example, I had to get a considerable amount of micro-content into Japanese (and occasionally into English). (Micro-content is the words, blurbs and phrases that attract attention to 'redirects,' such as navigation.) To produce a symmetrical site, these translations have to be awfully precise--which is difficult to do since these phrases are almost entirely stripped of context. The poor translators suffered mightily over tiny pieces of meaning! I guarantee that when they finally broke down and started lobbing help calls at me, a bit of semantics training from Ladusaw and Farkas sure made it easier for me to understand their possible confusions and return the volleys with concise definitions.

The UCSC Linguistics program also taught me how to work effectively in collaborative work teams. Homework problems were always harder than any one person could solve alone, and so we had to work together, but then we wrote our answers up separately and weren't graded on a curve. In other words, competition was almost completely removed from the situation, and thus our study teams flourished.

Linguistics trained my brain as well as anything I could imagine for designing interaction architecture. Interaction architecture is the semantic paths that you make people take through an application or a website. How do you define the choices? How are they balanced in proportion or import both visually and semantically? Being good at interaction architecture comes from understanding how people intuit structure from meaning, or meaning from structure.

So although my choice of a Linguistics major arose mostly out of my admiration for the people teaching me at UC Santa Cruz, because I studied it with their infectious passion for a couple years, it trained my mind in a way that has benefited me ever since.

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