Jonisha Ash, B.A. (2018) and M.A. (2021) Linguistics with a concentration in Computational Linguistics
Jonisha says that human language is a puzzle. As a Data Analyst with Bloomberg in Princeton, NJ, she gets to spend her day working on language puzzles, which is her favorite. As part of her job, she spends time at the intersection of technology and linguistics dealing in news classification, writing and maintaining code for optimized searches, specifically in named-entity recognition and detection. These types of projects find data that are used by financial professionals to make investment decisions.
Another of Jonisha's favorite things about working at Bloomberg is the company's immense philanthropic footprint, with encouraged involvement by employees. Jonisha gets to volunteer at her favorite organization and then Bloomberg matches her time with a donation towards the cause. Finally, she emphasizes that Bloomberg really invests in employee development, and provides lots of opportunities for training and professional growth.
Jonisha credits her education in the Department of Linguistics at UNT for preparing her for her career. The excellent communication skills she took from her time there improves customer and client interactions. Her research skills provide the ability to delve deeply into her projects, and the technical skills learned from her computational linguistics classes provide the ability to work alongside the natural language processing and sentiment analysis groups.
She especially appreciated classes like Syntax with Dr. Haj Ross, Semantics with Dr. Alexis Palmer, where she employed qualitative analysis, Morphology with Dr. Shobhana Chelliah, and Statistical Analysis with Dr. Xian Zhang, whose voice she sometimes hears in her head when doing analysis in her job because he taught her the keys to understanding the data.
Jonisha also gives a shout out to Dr. Sadaf Munshi, who continues to provide so many opportunities for students to learn and join projects. It’s clear to Jonisha that Dr. Munshi truly cares about her students and wants to open doors for them through learning opportunities. Finally, she appreciates the Linguistics department’s Trevor Sisk for being amazing at knowing who’s who and what’s what at UNT to help students get what they need through his numerous contacts.