Sydney Wendling Email & Phone Number

"Don't get an English degree," they said. "AI is going to make your degree useless," they said.The camera cuts to me turning slowly in my desk chair, wringing my hands like a cartoon villain. You see, I was told this again and again throughout both my undergraduate and graduate degrees—and it was starting to get to me. I would see articles about the "top ten useless degrees" (typically all humanities) or the "death of the English major," and meanwhile the next article down would be about the tech industry flourishing. It didn't help that in my senior year of undergrad, I realized I had a fondness for computer science as well. I was feeling torn between the two fields, and it felt like the majority opinion online was to give up on the humanities in favor of STEM.I didn't want to do that, though. I wished for a way to combine my interests in tech with my English major skills, including my love of researching, teaching, and various types of writing. I felt that some of my favorite soft skills of mine—like pattern recognition (oftentimes manifested in my uncanny ability to connect any reading to a very specific and niche meme, but still!), creativity, and out-of-the-box problem-solving skills—could be of value in the tech industry too, if given the chance.The cartoon hand-wringing and mustache-twisting comes into play because apparently the tech industry DOES value those skills. The English major lives to see another day! In January of 2024, I saw that there was a need for writers, researchers, and critical thinkers to help train LLMs in different ways. It was serendipitous; I knew right away that it was for me. Freelancing as a Data Annotator has given me the best of both worlds—a place to further hone and show off my English major skills, and a place to indulge my increasing interest in machine learning. It is so fulfilling to be a part of this rapidly growing industry as an AI tutor of sorts and, more recently, as a prompt engineer as well. It is even more fulfilling, though, to show folks that it doesn't have to be STEM fields versus the humanities. To quote the modern philosopher Hannah Montana, "Mix it all together / And you know that it's the best of both worlds."All jokes aside, please feel free to reach out to me on here. I'm always down to have a conversation about English degrees, AI, memes—you name it!