After finishing his undergraduate work in Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Pomona College, CA, Joshua Minor applied to several linguistic Ph.D. programs. Despite being accepted to several of them, he chose not to pursue a higher degree. "I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't want to go into academia."

Joshua Minor

Minor spent the next two years working as a science teacher at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle before hearing about the University of Washington's Professional Master's in Computational Linguistics (UW Comp Ling). From the very beginning, Minor knew this was the program for him because it allowed him to quickly get a degree that would open up careers for him as a linguist in a technical context.

"The program offered me a way to re-enter a field I find interesting but in a faster, cheaper and more real world, job-oriented way than getting a Ph.D."

While enrolled in the program, Minor's passion for the industry carried over into his personal time. He formed a team to compete in the annual Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), a national conference put on by the government where teams from universities, research institutions and companies compete in the creation of different information retrieval projects.

Minor says what stands out most about the program is that it is truly a computational linguistics program. "The program combines both computer science and linguistics." He adds, "I was amazed at how applicable all of the program assignments were. They were exactly what a computational linguist would do."

Minor is now deciding between two different career paths—computational linguistic consulting or project management for a large company such as Microsoft. "There are lots of opportunities and jobs for people with this degree, and the UW Comp Ling program has prepared me for them."

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