Service Department Tractor Beam - Irreversible?

[Zeus Bird]

Thanks for the replies, everyone.  It is clear that reversing this trajectory requires broad-based support from inside and outside the department.  As I assess my situation, I continue to work on a realistic prognosis of what degree of collective effort might emerge at the school.

[mleok]

Thanks for the replies, everyone.  It is clear that reversing this trajectory requires broad-based support from inside and outside the department.  As I assess my situation, I continue to work on a realistic prognosis of what degree of collective effort might emerge at the school.

At the very least, it requires your department to take a cold hard look at your curriculum and course offerings, and ask hard questions about what students truly need and care about, as opposed to simply narrowly focusing on what your faculty want to teach.

[Wahoo Redux]

Our entire uni is in flux.  Enrollment is down and COVID seems to have badly damaged student ethos.  We are not sure how many of our students are coming back, hurting our already terrible retention efforts.  It is not clear what the admin is doing about all this except that they have started "sunsetting" low-enrollment majors and letting lines die.  My FT NTT will probably be gone in a couple of months.

But our humanities department is somewhat successful as a service department.  The department was approached by the business school, and we have a number of classes designed specifically for business students which always have waiting lists.

The department actually seems to be surviving by becoming even more of a service department, even if it will lose a lot of its structure.  These business-oriented class are boring for those of us who are actually passionate about our core subjects-----but they do guarantee some people will have jobs.

[Parasaurolophus]

I'm very sorry to hear that, Wahoo Redux. My fingers are crossed for you.

[mamselle]

One language department I know of did a line in "XXX" for business courses.

Requirement was two year's basic courses and then a years' work with business forms, standard boiler-plate terms and phrases, national preferences in style, etc.

They did a small certificate program with another year's work on both the language basics and the business materials; they later added another certificate with a focus on a couple of areas, like computer technology and medicine, and another with medical and scientific translation with more work.

The basic classes became feeders for the certificate programs, which supported the basics for those who needed them for other things--like, say, literature, humanities research, etc.

Win-win, as far as I could tell.

M.

[kiana]

One language department I know of did a line in "XXX" for business courses.

Requirement was two year's basic courses and then a years' work with business forms, standard boiler-plate terms and phrases, national preferences in style, etc.

They did a small certificate program with another year's work on both the language basics and the business materials; they later added another certificate with a focus on a couple of areas, like computer technology and medicine, and another with medical and scientific translation with more work.

The basic classes became feeders for the certificate programs, which supported the basics for those who needed them for other things--like, say, literature, humanities research, etc.

Win-win, as far as I could tell.

M.

One of my techy friends started out doing that for Japanese, fell in love with the language and culture, ended up double majoring, and used that to get a really great job with a Japanese tech company. They pay for him to go to Japan, too.

[Wahoo Redux]

I'm very sorry to hear that, Wahoo_Redux. My fingers are crossed for you.

Thank you.

[mamselle]

One language department I know of did a line in "XXX" for business courses.

Requirement was two year's basic courses and then a years' work with business forms, standard boiler-plate terms and phrases, national preferences in style, etc.

They did a small certificate program with another year's work on both the language basics and the business materials; they later added another certificate with a focus on a couple of areas, like computer technology and medicine, and another with medical and scientific translation with more work.

The basic classes became feeders for the certificate programs, which supported the basics for those who needed them for other things--like, say, literature, humanities research, etc.

Win-win, as far as I could tell.

M.

One of my techy friends started out doing that for Japanese, fell in love with the language and culture, ended up double majoring, and used that to get a really great job with a Japanese tech company. They pay for him to go to Japan, too.

Yes, there are a couple of online free-lance transcription agencies who send out a test, and if you do the transcription correctly, you're hired on an ad-hoc basis. The 'better-known' languages for English speakers (especially French, German, Spanish, and Russian) for tech and medical stuff, pay particularly well.

I did a tiny bit of this for a group that didn't pay quite as well and was always in a hurry; for medical transcription in particular, accuracy usually requires a close read-through since many terms are just one or two letters away from many other terms (endo-, vs. exo, for example...you wouldn't want to get THOSE wrong!); I was going to apply to one of the online groups but then got started on a different sort of position entirely so never did.

But if you language chops are strong, it's good money in some cases, and it's remote, and it's often interesting in a fly-on-the-wall kind of way.

M.