Dr. Anna Marie Trester
Anna Marie Trester
Founder of Career Linguist
Anna Marie Trester founded Career Linguist in 2013. As the author of Bringing Linguistics to Work and Employing Linguistics for Bloomsbury Press, she speaks and gives workshops as Career Linguist and with organizational partners PIER Consulting Group, The FrameWorks Institute, and Anecdote International.
Prior to joining FrameWorks, she served as the director of the MA in Language and Communication (MLC) program for the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University, where she worked with students to apply their sociolinguistic training to professional contexts. She has taught courses at Georgetown University, Howard University, University of Maryland, University College, and Boise State. Her courses have covered cross-cultural communication, language and social media, and the ethnography of communication.
As an applied sociolinguist, Anna has research interests in improvisation, performance, narrative, intertextuality, professional self-presentation, language and identity, language in social media, and the language of business. She is the co-editor (with renowned linguistics professor Deborah Tannen) of Discourse 2.0, published in 2013 by Georgetown University Press. Anna was profiled by the Linguistics Society of America in its December, 2014, member spotlight. She received her MA from New York University and her PhD in linguistics from Georgetown University.
Dr. Anna Marie Trester's Background
Anna Marie Trester first learned about linguistics during a year abroad in Costa Rica. She felt invigorated by the experience of simultaneously acquiring both language ability and metapragmatic awareness of linguistic structure. She uses this blog to engender the same degree of dynamic reflexivity. For her, the practical problem came when she got back home where she was supposed to figure out what to do with her life!
She knew what she was passionate about, but she did not know how to turn that into meaningful employment. So she went wherever language led her. First it was working as a server in a Mexican restaurant, and picked up some miscellaneous jobs teaching English and Spanish. Just when she started applying to jobs at universities to work with study abroad programs, she got offered an opportunity to move to NYC. Within a few months, her ability to speak Spanish got her hired as an “interpreter” in an investment bank.
However, linguistics was there at the back of her mind all along. She learned that her company would pay her to get an MA, so if she could just convince them that it would help her do her job better, she began the pitch that she talks to this day about: That once you see that language structures experience everywhere you look, you want to be better able to harness its power. This brought her to the position she has today in the interpretation unit of the FrameWorks Institute, where she works with social change advocates to build understanding about their work through more effective and strategic communication.
Before Career Linguist, she was at Georgetown University for a number of years, teaching students to find professional expression of their skills and training in sociolinguistics. This sparked an interest which continues to this day, how to help linguists bring their awareness of language and culture to their job search. Ultimately, this process involves crafting and telling a series of very important narratives.
The skills that you cultivate as a linguist will serve you in navigating whatever the future brings, whether that be a job, further study, or simply a better understanding of how you interact with the people in your life. Language is everywhere, tell her about where you see it.
“Anna Marie has cultivated a wonderful network of like-minded folks who share her passion for finding diverse, exciting careers for linguists.”
Elizabeth Stelle
Brilliant. Insightful. Encouraging.
Anna Marie’s published books are a must read for anyone interested in pursuing a career in linguistics.