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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] *********************************************** LLTI is a service of IALLT, the International Association for Language Learning (http://iallt.org/), and The Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning (http://www.languageconsortium.org/). Join IALLT at http://iallt.org. Otmar Foelsche, LLTI-Editor ([log in to unmask]) ***********************************************