I graduated in '05 as a special major in Cognitive Science, but my first love was linguistics -- especially language acquisition -- and so I wrote my comps on the evolution and functions of infant-directed speech (or 'motherese'). If you've got some time on your hands, you can check out my paper here: http://digitalcommons.carleton.edu/cscp/1.

After graduation, I moved to Boulder, Co. where I found a job at a startup company working to develop technology to assess children's language development. The premise is that the greater the amount of language (literally, the number of words spoken by parents) children experience during the first four years of life, the better their language skills and overall intellectual and academic capabilities in the future.

At this company in Boulder, I first worked in the research department, and then in the marketing department. I'm now living in Fort Collins, Co. and working at a marketing communications agency as an account executive. I've found that my background in linguistics and psychology is actually quite relevant to the marketing world, where it's all about discovering people's motivations and behaviors, and developing the right messages to communicate with them. My post-graduate path has not been straightforward and is somewhat untraditional for a linguistics student. So if you're are curious where a linguistics education can take you, feel free to contact me at akmcleod@gmail.com.