I’m an L1 Malay and L2 English speaking linguist currently based in Gelang Patah (Johor), a town located 15km or 15-min drive away from the international border of Malaysia and Singapore. I have over 4 years of working experience in linguistics in various industries including book publication (2018), machine learning (ML)/natural language processing (NLP) (2019 - 2020), and media & entertainment (2020 - present). I'm also currently working full time as a government officer, responsible for the training operation for over 16,000 state employees. Although this slightly drifts away from linguistics, there are a lot skills required and acquired here that have to do with linguistics, research, data analysis and project management (and I intend to unpack them in my blog later). To sum up my character, I am a high achiever. Throughout my life, I strive to do my very best in enriching my work and to bring positive impactful changes to the organisation I am part of. My most valuable attributes could be my highly analytical mind and organised working style. Though most of the times it's not expected of me nor is it my role, I love to sit and think of how the workflow for each of my duties can be made systematic. This is also made possible by my high digital literacy, which again, is driven by my passion for orderliness. For example, no school taught me how to use Microsoft Excel; but along the way, I picked up precious skills because I wanted to colour code certain cell contents, and because I wanted to have drop-down menus for specific keys in a column, and because I wanted to sort data by date but the system did not recognise my 'string' as 'date' hence unable to sort from latest to earliest, and even simply because I did not want to manually type 1 - 50 in every row. I am a natural problem solver. When I face a challenge, I seek a solution because I believe there will be one out there, undiscovered by me. I go the extra mile to self-study and learn all the more efficient ways to achieve an outcome. And this did not only start when I had my first job. I was always an excellent student, funnily from the kindergarten (we're talking about colouring contests here) to the postgraduate year. I've scored only A in all three public examinations in Malaysia at the age of 12 (5A's), 15 (8A's), and 17 (9A's). This was all possible, among others, because I was an organised and diligent student. I also displayed my leadership skills early in schools and was actively involved in various competitions, performances, and club activities. My most significant participation would be in the Zapin dance, which I started at six. So, graduating high school with 9A's, I was offered a scholarship by the Malaysian government to pursue my tertiary education abroad. My potentials continued to unleash. In 2013, I moved from Malaysia to New Zealand and I graduated with a bachelor's degree in Education, specialised in TESOL in 2016 (after 4 full years) as the best student with the highest GPA in the cohort. While doing my BEdTESOL, I also fulfilled the requirements for a major in Linguistics out of passion. The BEdTESOL degree didn't recognise an additional major but the school allowed me to 'unofficially' major in linguistics because I was prepared with all the auditing. I was independent; I knew what courses I needed to enrol in to fulfil the requirements to major in LING while also completing my main qualification in TESOL. I kept track of all the courses offered by the school and which ones I had to take, how many credit points they'd contribute, which trimester a course would be offered in, what prerequisite I must meet etc. I managed to "double-major". On the graduation day, I received an email from the school offering me another scholarship to pursue a postgraduate qualification, BA (Hons) in Linguistics. I wrote a 10,000 word thesis in three months in the final trimester of BA (Hons) in Linguistics, for which I received really encouraging comments by my supervisor who believed the thesis deserved to be published with some amendments. I provided new insights on the methodology of linguistic landscape research framework. I graduated that December 2017 once more with a first class honours degree.​ I'll share more on my journey from the first job to my current job in a separate section. Keep reading!