Amber,

Your message gave me a chuckle-- most of us also stumbled into the 
language lab business. An old IALLT joke was that Pam Castro was the 
only graduate student ever who had the professional goal of being a 
Lab Director (and she has been out of the field for a while now).

And I am as well, although I stay connected. I can tell you that I 
fell into it when I read a job description for an open position at UC 
Irvine and thought, "Who in the world besides me would have this 
unusual combination of knowledge and experience?" That was 
pre-internet days (oh good grief, let me be honest-- it was 
pre-personal computing days!), so it took me 2 years to find out that 
there were other odd ducks like myself dispersed among institutions 
across the U.S. And in those days, we were very isolated-- there 
weren't other technology + pedagogy-oriented folks other than the 
language center director at any given campus.

My background (at the time) was a BA in Spanish linguistics (and a MA 
in Precolumbian Art!), a knowledge of the language teaching 
methodologies at UC Irvine (where I had studied Spanish, French and 
Italian), and a really strong background in audio recording (and 
lesser background) in video production (having spent my college 
social time at the campus radio station and personal time with my 
video-producer husband). Judi Franz, who was my assistant and took my 
place when I left UCI in 1999 first came to the Lab with the 
credentials of having a BA in French and having been the "AV geek" at 
her high school (in addition to her incredible organizational and 
personality skills!).

Requirements certainly have changed since then, but the thing that 
connects all successful Language Center folks is an interest in and 
desire to continually explore, build skills, keep up with the 
technology-- and not just keep up with it, but to carry it to places 
that we think it should go--- and share their knowledge and expertise 
internally with their faculty and administrators and externally with 
language technology colleagues.

In addition to other responses you may receive here, IALLT has 
compiled periodic surveys of the state of the profession that you can 
find in back issues of the IALLT Journal (although the last one was 
several years ago).

LeeAnn Stone
World Language Specialist
Cengage Learning

Past IALLT President (1989-1991) [and constant IALLT promoter]

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Otmar Foelsche, LLTI-Editor ([log in to unmask])
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