How can undergraduate students take the initiative to present at a conference? Is it worth it? Scout McMillan shares her experience.
With shaky knees and sweaty palms Scout McMillan prepared to share her corpus linguistics research at the 2024 American Association for Corpus Linguistics (AACL) Conference. Her thoughts ran through the prepared notes explaining the software that Dr. Matt Baker (Brigham Young University) and Dr. Jordan Smith (University of Northern Colorado) and she had studied the past year. The long hours researching tracked changes made on documents were finally culminating in not only a software tool but also an academic article and this presentation.
Scout is currently an undergrad student at BYU who is double majoring in Editing and Publishing and Applied English Linguistics with a Digital Humanities and Technology minor. As a junior, her need for an internship to graduate with her minor led her to ask one of her professors, Dr. Matt Baker, if she could help with any of his research. Despite the intimidation of asking for extra work, Scout knew doing research with Dr. Baker would improve her skills, learning process, and perspective on research to make pursuing higher education or a job more attainable.
Spending the past few months making, test-running, and applying software to better improve our knowledge about tracked changes made in documents had come to one of the final stages—presentation. The AACL Conference showcases technology, corpus linguistics, and corpora related research, and this year it included Scout’s, Dr. Baker’s, and Dr. Smith’s research project.
Scout’s preparation paid off as she finished her co-presentation having explained all her work on their research, even with some of her former BYU professors in attendance who had influenced her learning at BYU. Throughout the rest of the conference, Scout was amazed to see other notable linguists and learn about unique and groundbreaking research.
So, what does it take to present at an academic conference? A degree? Experience? Actually, it is just a good research project, and it doesn’t even have to be your own! Scout didn’t imagine she would one day be presenting to her past BYU professors in a conference, but with the help of professors, hard work, and seeking opportunities, she landed herself doing exactly that!
Scout’s willingness to connect with professors and her interest to go above and beyond the required allowed for life-changing opportunities. She spent hours and hours doing research and work to uncover more information. This process wasn’t easy, and included working with several professors in their office hours and applying information she was learning in class to improve her research. Through this process, Scout learned to love working with professors, asking questions, and discovering how to apply class information. In her words she said, “It is fulfilling to contribute to something and be a part of research that will better humanity.”
Surprisingly, the software the research team developed involved everything Scout had been learning in her classes–including her minor and both majors. The chance to apply knowledge she had been using in class was invaluable for Scout and has greatly impacted her learning at BYU. Scout noted, “Often you hear it is hard to find a job, but going to this conference I realized that my skills were useful and could be applied in many ways.” Near the end of the research project, Scout realized her favorite part at BYU had been this internship experience where she was able to meet motivated people, learn about interesting topics, and contribute to and ask about others’ research.
If you’d like to get involved with the research of other professors in the Linguistics Department, you can learn more about ongoing research groups in the department and contact individual professors for additional information.