From Math to NLP: An Interview With Jamie Brandon, MS '19 in Computational Linguistics
September 12, 2025
Abigail Arnold | Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Jamie Brandon, MS ‘19, arrived at Brandeis’s Computational Linguistics at a pivot point in her studies. While she was mostly looking at math programs, she became intrigued by the computational linguistics field in her senior year of college. “I took a linguistics class for fun and could tell the field was growing,” she said. “As I went through my senior year, I pivoted away from math somewhat and wanted to do something more applied, which is how I ended up deciding on Brandeis.”
Once in the program, Brandon faced a whirlwind of learning opportunities. “Two years is too short!” she laughed. “There’s too much to learn.” She spent the first year of the program focusing on programming and theoretical linguistics, while also serving as a course assistant for math courses. “I really appreciated how I was able to build a foundation and how quickly the program takes it and runs with it,” she said. “By my second year, I had an internship in natural language processing, and the internship really set me up to transition to the workforce.” While Brandon said she had “too many favorite parts” of the program to list, she especially enjoyed connecting different foundational concepts in the Fundamentals of Computational Linguistics course and applying her math background to a new area in the Stat NLP course.
Brandon also praised the program’s supportive faculty. “All of the faculty were mentors. You learned from all of them in such different ways,” she said. Lotus Goldberg helped her learn theoretical linguistics. Sophia Malamud helped her grow as a course assistant and modeled how to offer feedback in constructive ways. James Pustejovsky showed her how to take complex concepts and boil them down to be “bite-sized and digestible.”
Her experience in the program also helped launch her career. “I met my connection for my first internship through the program’s industry networking reception brochure – I missed the person at the reception, but I enjoyed their blurb and reached out over email,” she said. This internship, at CallMiner, a company that uses natural language processing for call center analytics, began the summer after her first year in the program, continued through her second year, and led to a job there after graduation. Following additional jobs at WorkHuman and dictionary.com, she now works for Atlassian in a machine learning role. “The field is also moving so fast that I’ve had to learn new things that didn’t exist yet when I graduated,” she said. “In one of my last courses, we studied recently published NLP papers, which really trained me to read that type of writing and stay at the cutting edge in my career.”
Brandon offered advice and encouragement to prospective students in the field. “Be curious and ask the question even if you think you should know already. It’s easy to make assumptions about how something works or doesn’t, and finding those assumptions early helps you understand the concept better,” she said. She added that Brandeis’s program is one that encourages this process. “The faculty really want to help students, and I found that really valuable,” she said. “They never seem too busy or preoccupied with their own research but want you to be asking questions.”