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Virginia Tech | Culture

Being A Research Assistant: My Semester Overview

Jenna Mason Student Contributor, Virginia Tech
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Virginia Tech chapter and does not reflect the views of Her Campus.

This semester, I started my journey as a research assistant for the English department’s Speech Lab at Virginia Tech. The Speech Lab is a group of students, professors and faculty that work together on different projects to further research in linguistics and sociolinguistics. I had the great opportunity to work with Dr. Stefon Flego on an assortment of projects he’s been researching.  

At the beginning of the semester, I started with the New Zealand Vowel System by going through an annotating different parts of words. As the weeks progressed, I moved onto using a system called Praat where I found various vowels of an Icelandic corpora and hand annotated them. All of this was in preparation for the 2025 Linguistics Showcase that was held on Monday, May 5th.  

Over the course of the semester, I learned a lot more about linguistics than I ever thought I would, but that wasn’t the most important thing I got from this research assistantship. I found out that these are some of the most interesting aspects of life that I had never even known about. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my semester, and it made me realize that this is something that I want to go into and make a living from.  

You don’t learn a lot about linguistics or sociolinguistics before coming to college. I honestly didn’t even know that it was a thing you had to or could learn about. Since taking a few classes and being a part of the speech lab, I’ve learned so much about things like vowel spaces, phonetics and much more. My interest in these topics has peaked and become something special to me.  

This semester has made me realize that I want to pursue linguistic research and continue my undergraduate research in the future. I’ve been so proud to work with the English department this semester and I can’t wait to continue into my Junior and Senior years of college. Since my interest has peaked so much, I’ve even started looking for master’s and PHD programs for linguistics to widen my horizons and further my education. Linguistics may not be something many people learn about early on, but thanks to the Language Sciences minor and Speech Lab here at Virginia Tech, I’ve found my passion, and I absolutely cannot wait to pursue it.  

Jenna Mason

Virginia Tech '27

My name is Jenna Mason, I'm a Multimedia Journalism and English major at Virginia Tech. I'm also a Language Sciences minor. I've written for a newspaper since my freshman year of high school, and I've fallen in love with writing and editing ever since. I'm not sure of what I want to go into yet after college, but I know that it's something within the media field or teaching at the collegiate level.

Other things about me is that I'm a cat mom, her name is Snickers and she's 17-years-old. I've had her since I was about eight and she has been my best friend ever since. I also really like crafting, one of my favorite things to do is air dry clay. I love making magnets and cute, little figurines.