Final Day: LIN 301

Thinking about Career Readiness, the Final Project, Course Evals

Dr. Andrew M. Byrd

Final Project Presentations

LIN 301 & Career Readiness

NACE Competencies

  • National Association of Colleges & Employers
  • Helps educators & students understand the job market - skills, salaries, majors
  • Has come up with 8 “competencies” – skills that students should have when entering the job market

NACE Competencies

  1. Career & Self-Development

Taking initiative in shaping your own growth — seeking feedback, expanding skills, and building a professional network.

NACE Competencies

  1. Communication

Exchanging information clearly and effectively through writing, speaking, presenting, and active listening.

NACE Competencies

  1. Critical Thinking

Analyzing problems, evaluating evidence, and making sound decisions using logic and reasoning.

NACE Competencies

  1. Equity & Inclusion

Engaging respectfully with diverse people and perspectives, and contributing to inclusive, equitable practices.

NACE Competencies

  1. Leadership

Motivating and guiding others, managing projects, making decisions, and fostering a positive team environment.

NACE Competencies

  1. Professionalism

Demonstrating reliability, integrity, work ethic, accountability, and the ability to meet expectations consistently.

NACE Competencies

  1. Teamwork

Working effectively with others toward shared goals, managing conflict, giving and receiving feedback, and supporting group success.

NACE Competencies

  1. Technology

Using digital tools and technologies efficiently, responsibly, and adaptively across different work contexts.

NACE Competencies: Overview

Overview

LIN 301 strengthens all eight NACE competencies, with especially strong growth in:

  • Critical Thinking
  • Technology
  • Career & Self-Development
  • Professionalism

1. Career & Self Development

You:

  • Built and maintained a GitHub Pages portfolio.
  • Developed workflow habits: version control, reproducibility, environment setup.
  • Solved real technical issues: Python installs, spaCy errors, RStudio/reticulate quirks.
  • Learned to seek help strategically (documentation, debugging, peers).

2. Communication

You:

  • Wrote clear, reproducible Quarto notebooks.
  • Commented code and explained results.
  • Created public-facing HTML pages.
  • Will give a final presentation explaining methods and results.

3. Critical Thinking

You:

  • Debugged broken code and environment conflicts.
  • Designed research questions for your project.
  • Interpreted spaCy/WordNet outputs and visualizations.
  • Evaluated model errors, tokenization issues, Unicode normalization.

4. Equity & Inclusion

You:

  • Worked with multilingual datasets.
  • Saw how NLP tools perform differently across languages.
  • Observed bias and limitations in certain models (such as spaCy).

5. Leadership

You:

  • Managed tasks within the group final project.
  • Delegated roles: data cleaning, analysis, visualization, README authoring.
  • Practiced informal project leadership.

6. Professionalism

You:

  • Tracked work in GitHub repos.
  • Met deadlines for multi-stage deliverables.
  • Maintained clean, reproducible code and file structures.
  • Practiced academic integrity and responsible data use.

7. Teamwork

You:

  • Collaborated on the group project using GitHub.
  • Negotiated division of labor.
  • Reviewed each other’s code and resolved conflicts.
  • Practiced communication during merge requests and debugging.

8. Technology

  • Git, GitHub, and version control.
  • LaTeX, HTML, Python, and Quarto.
  • pandas for data cleaning & analysis.
  • spaCy, WordNet, regex.
  • data visualization
  • Unicode handling.
  • RStudio + Python integration.

Course Evals

Thoughts on How this Semester Went

  • First time teaching this! Was definitely a challenge.

Things that I’ll Try Again

  • GitHub + GitHub Pages
  • Python: same amount of skills
  • Group Homework – perhaps expand?
  • Class Projects
    • but needs models!

Things that I’ll Probably Change

  • RStudio –> ?
  • LaTeX –> Python –> HTML
    • Add an Extra Week for Python
  • Less Time with Minutiae, More Time Problem Solving
  • Spread Assignments Out Better

Feedback that I Want from You

  • Vibe Coding!
  • In your feedback, focus on:
    • one thing you really liked about this course
    • one thing you thing should be improved