Introduction

Poetry of Sappho¹ comes to us in all but smithers. Remarkably, this does not make her poetry impossible for a modern reader to appreciate, but it is important to understand just how tattered the remains are of the papyri on which her songs were recorded. Additionally, the way people wrote in that era was intended to maximize use of the available space on the sheets; papyri was a valuable resource. They did not write with word breaks or lineation. As Anne Carson puts it, reading such a text “is hard even when it comes to us in its entirety and most papyri don’t,” (p. ix). Carson’s translations attempt to preserve these gaps, stylistically indicating their presence with the use of square brackets in her typesetting. As she points out, this changes ones’ reading experience and permits the layperson to engage with these works and imagine what might fill the blanks.² I will be talking mostly about the fragment of Sappho’s kletic³ hymn translated by Anne Carson which begins with “here to me from Krete” and ends with “nectar mingled with festivities: pour,” (p. 7). 

Discussion

The purpose of this hymn is plain: it is an invocation to Kypris⁴. 

]

here to me from Krete to this holy temple

[…]

In this place you Kypris taking up

in gold cups delicately

nectar mingled with festivities:

pour.

Here I have elided the majority of the fragment to show the structure: “come to me (…) and fill this space, Kypris, and fill our cups with nectar.”⁵ Ritual invocation, then, is the framework in which Sappho presents her subject: the feeling of suspense, of anticipation before release. Most of this fragment is spent simply describing the place in which Kypris is to be summoned: a holy temple, ostensibly somewhere in Lesvos. There is a sense of ritual in this; Sappho describes the temple with idyllic sensory imagery, as though there is some need to convince Kypris to come and fill the space. But another purpose this may serve is to string along the listener. We are missing the opening of this hymn, but from what we have it begins with an adverb of place (Carson rendered this as “here to me”) which is not paired with its verb until the very last word, “pour”⁶ (p. 358). The entire body of the hymn, then, is sort of like a long cliffhanger: a moment of suspense drawn out to that edge between the pleasure and pain that are both caused by anticipation. That feeling is the subject, and what better a figure to evoke it with than the goddess of desire? 

I believe that Sappho’s ‘commentary’ on this subject is encapsulated there, too. The figure she is calling upon is one which represents eros, lust, desire, and even in the modern age it’s easy for us to connect these concepts and passions with the idea of suspense and the release of building up and of delayed gratification – we are still the same kind of hominids, after all. What I think may be lost in our modern cultural context, however, is that this was sacred to Sappho and her contemporaries. Whatever our modern connotations may be, Kypris was a goddess. Carson makes a rather concise observation here: “Arrival is the issue, for it sanctifies waiting: attente de Dieu,”⁷ (p. 358). If Sappho is attempting to say something here, it may be that it’s that ephemeral suspense which is sacred; made sacred by the eventual arrival, but the arrival in and of itself may be meaningless without the wait. Then again, perhaps that was just understood, and the true meaning lie in entirely other aspects of the hymn. We lack the cultural context to grasp the nuances. For all we know, this whole work was satirical. Going from what we have, however, I would argue that this might be one of the most beautiful and intimate ways that somebody has ever glorified suspense.

Closing

My thoughts on this are rather banal. I am personally less interested in what she is saying (in this poem) than how she is going about saying it. And, vexingly, that’s a question we will likely never be able to fully answer. All of Sappho’s music is lost; we have no idea how this was sung, and I feel that would have been dreadfully important for truly understanding any of her work. Modern music often makes use of a contrast between the level of joy or anger or sorrow expressed in the lyrics against a sometimes very different emotion expressed in the underlying harmony and rhythm. Sappho is credited with the invention of the Mixolydian mode, one of the musical scales used in Western music which starts on the 5th note relative to the Ionian (major) scale, and has a lowered 7th. In the modern era this sound is heavily associated with funk, blues, jazz. She lived roughly 2,600 years ago, and yet we should likely be picturing her poems as being sung in and accompanied by a lyre in a blues-y or jazzy scale (and as a saxophonist I really am partial to that image). Despite my attempt here, I don’t think we actually can ascertain the subjects of Sappho’s poems with any degree of certainty. In the same vain, however, it’s worth appreciating how beautiful the fragments are by themselves.

Footnotes

¹ Originally «Ψάπφω» “Psáppʰo” and etymologically distinct from «σάπφειρος» “sáppʰeiros” which gives us sapphire (Harper, n.d.b). Perhaps we should render her name as “Psappho.”

² “Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half…” (p. xi).

³ “The poem is a hymn of the type called ‘kletic,’ that is, a calling hymn, an invocation to god to come from where she is to where we are,” (p. 358).

⁴ In the original text, «Κύπρι» “kúpri” – one of the common literary epithets of Aphrodite indicating the goddess’s close association with the island Cyprus (Cyrino p. 27). Sappho sometimes uses this name, but at other times simply uses «Αφρόδιτα» “Apʰródita” (Carson p. 1). I am not qualified to determine if there is some deeper meaning behind when which name is used or why Kypris is the name used here. That said, she tends to prefer the name Kypris: see pp. 12, 24 etc.

⁵ Referring to her rendering of “gold cups” Carson writes, “not mortal tableware, nor is nectar normally a beverage enjoyed by any but gods…” (p. 359).

⁶ Carson renders this from the word «οἰνοχόειϛα» “oinokʰóeioa” in the original text (p. 6). This verb appears to be a compound of «χένω» “kʰéno” meaning to pour out and «οινος» “oinos” meaning wine (Harper, n.d.a).

⁷ French, “waiting for god.” Also the name of a letter by Simone Weil, whom Carson quotes later on the same page: “God can only be present in creation under the form of absence.”

References

Carson, Anne. (2002). If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. New York: Vintage Books. 

Cyrino, Monica (2010). Aphrodite. New York and London: Routledge.

Harper, D. (n.d.a). Etymology of oeno-. Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved February 26, 2025, from https://www.etymonline.com/word/oeno-

Harper, D. (n.d.b). Etymology of sapphire. Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved February 26, 2025, from https://www.etymonline.com/word/sapphire.

Professor Norris,

Language is what makes us human. Other great apes match us, to varying degrees, on virtually every other metric (our propensity for tool use, I would argue, hinges first on language and our ability to communicate complex ideas). There is no other function which every human uses; it defines our species. Across the animal kingdom, we are the only species which has developed such an intricate and wildly complicated method of communication — or, so it seems. As it turns out, there is another group of animals which may approach some semblance of what we think of as language: cetaceans. Yes, those blubbery, marine-adapted mammals hold, in their idiosyncratic whistling and clicking, the closest thing to human language seen anywhere else in the animal world. Further, these animals exhibit another otherwise uniquely hominid feature: culture. As interesting as it would be to investigate the link between language and culture in particular, if we’re looking into cetacean language there is a more fundamental issue to address. Do the communication strategies of cetaceans such as bottlenose dolphins or humpback whales qualify as “language”?

I have studied various languages and general comparative linguistics for some years as a hobbyist, and thus have some familiarity with the technicality of language and its expression in language academics. I am new to the academic world of study around marine mammals, but for a long time I have held an amateur interest in comparative anatomical morphology — essentially, how things evolved into analogous structures, such as the fact that the various finger and hand bones are still present in a whale’s flippers despite millions of years of evolution adapting the limb into a different shape and purpose.

There is already a fair amount of research into this idea, and the research is ongoing. One relevant article, “Whale song shows language-like statistical structure” by Arnon et al. (2025) in the journal Science was published just a few days ago.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
Ethan.

References

Arnon, I., Kirby, S., Allen, J. A., Garrigue, C., Carroll, E. L., & Garland, E. C. (2025). Whale song shows language-like statistical structure. Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), 387(6734), 649–653. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adq7055

Research Question

To what extent can whales or their relatives be said to have “language” or not?

Sources

Arnon, I., Kirby, S., Allen, J. A., Garrigue, C., Carroll, E. L., & Garland, E. C. (2025). Whale song shows language-like statistical structure. Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), 387(6734), 649–653. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adq70558

In this article, Arnon et al. (2025) investigate the statistical structure of humpback whale song. They show that humpback whale communications contain repeating units which follow a Zipfian distribution – a property of human language that shows that the most common words in human speech follows a power law curve. This type of statistical coherence is thought to facilitate learning and the faithful transmission of language across generations. That this also is evident in humpback whale communication is compelling evidence that their communications are information-rich. This will be used in my argument as supporting evidence for the idea that whales communicate via their own form of language. 

Cannon, Cutler. “A Theoretical Account of Whale Song Syntax: A New Perspective for Understanding Human Language Structure.” Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, vol. 8, no. 1, 2023, pp. 5571-, https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v8i1.5571.

In this article, Cutler (2023) discusses language and syntactic structure broadly and provides a theoretical framework for whale language. The article spends some time discussing theories of language at large, i.e. what actually is a language to begin with, and gives some insight on the question of  how we classify them. This structure is contrasted with other complex but non-language-like communication structures which appear in nature, such as birdsong. I intend to use this article to demonstrate why whales specifically are so interesting to linguists, and also to give deeper insight on how whale language could work if some assumptions are made. 

Garland, E. C., Rendell, L., Lamoni, L., Poole, M. M., & Noad, M. J. (2017). Song hybridization events during revolutionary song change provide insights into cultural transmission in humpback whales. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114(30), 7822–7829. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26486118

Garland et. al. (2017) talk about research into the hybridization of whale songs, which is when a whale is adopting the song of a different group of whales. These ‘hybridization events’ give us key insights into the learning processes by which humpbacks learn their songs, and how they are culturally transmitted. They found that when whales were transitioning to a new song, they sometimes produced hybrid songs that combined elements of the old and new songs. These hybridization events occurred in two distinct ways: either through single hybrid phrases blended content from both songs, or by splicing complete themes from the revolutionary song into the existing song structure. Notably, these splicing events seemed to take place at points where the two songs had similar sounds arranged in similar patterns. This is useful for discussing possible means of language acquisition.

Grebowicz, Margret. Whale Song. Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017.

In this book, Grebowicz (2017) discusses cetaceans at large, and covers everything from their cultural perception shifting to details about various research projects looking into different kinds of whales’ communication. She discusses the history of scientific attempts to understand whale communication, as well as the cultural impact of whale songs. Grebowicz examines what whales have meant to humans and how that has changed, and she explains some of the challenges of attempting interspecies communication. It gives a good overview of the topic in a wider context, and for my article will be useful to draw upon for that purpose. It also provides some pathos.

Harrison, Jack. “Music, Language, and Technology in More-Than-Human Sonic Cultures.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association, vol. 149, no. 2, 2024, pp. 627–37, https://doi.org/10.1017/rma.2024.39.

In this article, Harrison (2024) explores the intersection of music and language. He focuses on the syntactic structure of sperm whale vocalizations. Research by the Cetacean Translation Initiative (CeTI) is discussed, and an attempt is made to use AI to analyze sperm whale coda clicks. Some ways that these codas may be parsed syntactically are discussed, revealing another possible parallelism to human language. The author discusses what is known about their vocalization methods, describes their structure, and also talks about what is not known yet – the actual meanings of these codas, for instance, is entirely unknown. It also talks about the fact that whale language may be more analogous to music than to language. This article will be a useful source for generalizations, as well as for addressing counter-arguments such as the possibility that whale song is not language at all, and rather may be more analogous to music (which also shows some language-like structure when viewed through a statistical lens). 

Whiten, A., & Youngblood, M. (2025). Convergent evolution in whale and human vocal cultures. Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), 387(6734), 581–582. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adv2318

In this article, Whiten et al. (2025) discuss recent literature on humpback whale communication and show that humpback whale vocalizations exhibit a similar hierarchical structure to human language. They discuss the significance of the observations and suggest that they may indicate convergent evolution, which may have implications for what communication paradigms are effective in nature. It may also have implications for how language originally developed in humans. This will be useful for discussing why we might expect whale communication to be language-like in the first place when they are not a close relative of humans, especially given the fact that our actual close relatives do not exhibit language-like communication. 

Youngblood, Mason. (2025, February 5). Language-like efficiency in whale communication. Science Advances, 11(6), eads6014. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.ads6014

In this article, Youngblood (2025) shows detailed data which demonstrate that humpback whale language exhibits two different Zipfian laws – the power law, as discussed in other sources, and also Zipf’s law of abbreviation, which is also characteristic of humans language. Additionally, the study found that humpback whale vocalizations appear to follow other communication-efficiency principles seen in human language. One of these is Menzerath’s law, which states that longer sequences have shorter elements. The author clarifies that this does not necessarily mean (and there still is no evidence to suggest that) their communication encodes the same kind of information that human language does. I will use this as a source supporting the idea that whales have a language-like communication system, as it demonstrates that, language or not, whales and especially humpbacks can be empirically shown to have very nuanced, complex communication strategies which show signs of having been optimized for efficiency.

Abstract

Language is a phenomenon thought to be unique to humans, but researchers have long been interested in the potential linguistic capacities of other animals. The most promising case for non-human language rests with cetaceans, particularly humpback whales. This paper investigated the current state of research in cetacean communications in order to draw a conclusion on whether or not whales have true language. After careful consideration of what is known about whale vocal physiology, whale song composition and structure, cultural transmission in whales, it was concluded that humpback whales do very likely have language.

Introduction

Language as we know it is intrinsically human. Across the animal kingdom, we appear to be the only species which has developed what we know as language. Other species of animals certainly have evolved their own forms of complex communication (i.e. the dances of bees, the intricate chemical pheromone system of ants and some other eusocial insects, the unique call of the Carolina chickadee, the sub-sonic long-range rumbling of elephants, etc.) but human language is set apart both in terms of complexity and structure. There is, however, one other group of animals which seems like it may possess a comparable mode of communication: cetaceans. Specifically, the songs of humpback whale and of the blue whale are of interest, though other cetaceans (sperm whales, belugas, orcas, bottlenose dolphins, et al.) are also promising. This paper set out to investigate the extent to which whales may or may not have true language, and concluded that cetaceans, especially humpback whales, possess language-like communication.

Methods

Materials for this paper were found primarily by keyword-searching databases of academic journals for various phrases such as “cetacean language,” “whale language,” “whale culture,” “whale song,” “humpback whale syntax,” “dolphin language,” and so on. Additionally, filters to restrict results to recent and peer-reviewed publications were used. Several print books were also considered, but only one, Whale Song by Margret Grebowicz, was ultimately obtained and used. One somewhat older source, a literature review on ape language writting in 1998, was used for the preceeding discussion on the linguistic dead-end found in other apes. Due to the various practical, financial, and logistical challenges involved in conducting primary research on cetaceans, no primary research was attempted.

Background

Great Apes

There is some familiarity in the popular awareness with attempts made by various researchers to teach apes, particularly chimpanzees, to use sign language. It is worth addressing these experiments and the results they yielded, since there is a widely held misconception that any of these experiments were successful. They were not. It was found that apes were capable of learning a small repertoire of signs, i.e. a limited vocabulary. The underlying structure of language, however, was never reproduced. The apes could not form sentences, questions, or otherwise productively or syntactically combine the lexical units they had been taught (Hixson, 1998).

Defining Language

Human language is comprised of more than just semantic units; it relies on structure. Specifically, there is a tree-like hierarchical structure thought to be inherent to all human language. Because of this structure, it is possible to arange semantic units in novel ways in order to express novel ideas. Human language, therefore, exhibits both productivity and semanticity. There are some examples of natural communication systems which are both semantic and hierarchically structured which still are not language, however. Birdsong and honey bee dances both convey structured information. However, these systems lack a means of productivity. While bird song can be hierarchically structured, there is no underlying syntax to guide the placement of units within the tree; in otherwords, the hierarchy is essentially arbitrary, and carries no meaning. Honey bee dances are equally syntax-less. This means that, unlike in human language, these and other such animal communication modes are not capable of generating infinitely recursing structures (Cannon, 2023).

Interest in Whale Song

In contrast to birdsong, bee dances, and non-human primates, all of which have been thoroughly examined in the literature since the 1940s, cetacean vocalizations are a relatively recent focus of syntactic examination. Today, precious little is known for certain about whale song, including the whales’ reasons for singing at all. For example, because adult humpback males seem to sing far more often than females or juveniles, it has been hypothesized that singing is part of the mate selection process. However, juveniles and females are also known to sing, and it has been observed that song also mediates male-to-male interactions (Cannon). Despite this gap in our understanding, however, much can be said about the structure of whale song through observation and statistical analyses. That humpback whale song exhibits a hierarchical structure has been known since the 1970s.

Findings

Physiology

There is a significant difference between the methods of vocal production between humans and whales. In human speech, air is pushed through folds in the larynx, which vibrate, and the resulting sound can be modulated into all the sounds used for human language via the system of muscles in the throat and the oral and nasal cavities. By contrast, whales do not expel air in order to sing. Instead, they have U-shaped laryngeal folds which cause vibrations when air is pushed through to a laryngeal sac (an organ unique to whale anatomy, making egressive sounds. The air in the laryngeal sac is then recirculated to the lungs, making ingressive sounds (Cannon). Humans are also capable of making ingressive sounds (such as the sound of a gasp) but while we commonly make these sounds, they are not phonemic in any human language. Other types of contrastive phoneme series, however, are extremely common. Whales using alternating egressive and ingressive sounds in their vocalizations may have some impact on syntax, especially if egressive and ingressive sounds are truly contrastive to the whales, and thus can be used to differentiate between semantic elements.

Hierarchical Structure

The base unit of the humpback whale song is called a “note.” A note is a sound usually 1 to 4 seconds in length, with momentary pause between it and other notes. Several notes together make up a “phrase.” A phrase is usually, though not always, repeated 2 to 6 times, comprising a “theme.” A full “song” is then composed of several themes. The song may take several minutes to complete, and the whale will usually repeat it for several hours or days. This structure of notes comprising phrases comprising themes comprising songs may be compared directly to the human language hierachical structure of phonemes comprising morphemes comprising words comprising sentences.

Statistical Analyses

Humpback whale song contains repeating units (described above) which follow a Zipfian power law distribution, meaning that the frequency of distinct elements follows a power law curve (Arnon, 2025). The most common element is twice as common as the next most common element, which itself is twice as common as the third most common element, etc. Human languages reliably follow this law. Moreover, humpback whale song follows Zipf’s law of abbreviation, another charcateristic of human language (Youngblood, 2025). In a dataset which follows Zipf’s law of abbreviation (such as the lexicon of a language), the most frequent elements are also the shortest.

Culture

Virtually all cetaceans exhibit cultural transmission to some degree; for example, orcas, sperm whales, and bottlenose dolphins all display dialectic variation in their calls between different pods. In the case of sperm whales, this dialectic variation is so pronounced that the term for the social groups of sperm whales in the nomenclature is “vocal clan,” (Grebowicz, 2017). Humpback whales live in less tightly related social groups than those of these other mentioned cetaceans, but cultural transmission in humpbacks is extremely evident. A group of traveling humpbacks generally all sing the same song, and over periods of time, it slowly changes. Sometimes, however, a group of humpbacks will adopt the song of some other group in large part or wholesale, and by this mechanism, cultural transmission can be traced around the globe (Garland, 2017). The hybridization events which occur when whales are adopting a new song also give key insights into acquisition behavior. During hybridization events, the whales either go through a period of splicing complete themes from the revolutionary song into the existing song structure, or they create new, hybrid phrases, containing discrete content from phrases in both songs (Garland). This may hint at the capacity of humpback whale song for productivity, a key component of human language.

Limitations

For now, it is impossible to know what information is carried by the vocalizations of any cetacean whatsoever (Harrison, 2024). In fact, some researchers doubt whether semantic information can be encoded in whale song at all. There is no evidence to suggest that whale song encodes the same type of information that human language does (Youngblood). It has been suggested that the term “song” may have been the most correct analysis all along (Grebowicz). After all, human music possesses many of the same statistical characters that language does, yet is neither semantic nor syntactic. At this time, it cannot definitively be said that this is or is not the case.

Conclusions

Despite the aformentioned limitations, evidence does seem to point in the direction of language. While the usage and purpose of whale song clearly must differ greatly from that of human language, too many indicators suggest that we’re looking at an information-rich communication mode exhibiting both semanticity and productivity to some degree.

References

Arnon, I., Kirby, S., Allen, J. A., Garrigue, C., Carroll, E. L., & Garland, E. C. (2025). Whale song shows language-like statistical structure. Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), 387(6734), 649–653. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adq70558

Cannon, Cutler. “A Theoretical Account of Whale Song Syntax: A New Perspective for Understanding Human Language Structure.” Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, vol. 8, no. 1, 2023, pp. 5571-, https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v8i1.5571.

Garland, E. C., Rendell, L., Lamoni, L., Poole, M. M., & Noad, M. J. (2017). Song hybridization events during revolutionary song change provide insights into cultural transmission in humpback whales. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114(30), 7822–7829. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26486118

Grebowicz, Margret. Whale Song. Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017.

Harrison, Jack. “Music, Language, and Technology in More-Than-Human Sonic Cultures.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association, vol. 149, no. 2, 2024, pp. 627–37, https://doi.org/10.1017/rma.2024.39.

Hixson M. D. (1998). Ape language research: A review and behavioral perspective. The Analysis of verbal behavior, 15, 17–39. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03392921

Youngblood, Mason. (2025, February 5). Language-like efficiency in whale communication. Science Advances, 11(6), eads6014. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.ads6014

When I first entered this class, I was full of anxiety and terrified to speak with any of my peers, let alone work with them. And almost immediately, we were cordoned off into groups and assigned collaborative group work. That first day, I had thought that I was going to hate the class all semester. Rather quickly, however, my fears were alleviated. The group work wasn't so bad, after all. My peers were friendly and most of them just as shy of other people as I am. The anxiety subsided.

I enjoyed being given the chance to explore a topic of my own choosing and spend a large large amount of time exploring it with the justification of it being for an assignment. It's an opportunity that rarely comes along in an undergrad. Pluswhich, going through the step by step process of building a research paper did help me figure out what methods work best for me and what methods just didn't click. I found a workflow that suited me.

And of course, Professor Norris is just an excellent human being. I found him genuinely funny and relatable, and I appreciated the professional interest and concern he showed me and other students regarding not only our chosen research topics, but also events in our personal lives and the impact those events had on our academic lives. Hopefully he wasn't bored out of his mind by my paper on whales!

Contact
Academic: ecrok001@odu.edu | Professional saturnine.solar@gmail.com

Education

Old Dominion University

Spring 2025 – Present

• Currently pursuing a BFA in Applied Linguistics

Tidewater Community College

Spring, Summer, & Fall 2024

• Completed 3 semesters of general requirements/prerequisites before transferring to ODU.

Frank W. Cox High School

Graduated with Honors June 2020

Certifcations

Javascript

• Certified via W3Schools
• Exam passed at the “Advanced” level

Projects

Lexicanter

Overview

• Cross-platform desktop application
• Services for file-sync between devices
• Services for viewing files online
• Companion plugin for Obsidian
• Companion Discord bot

Since 2022, I have been working on this FOSS (free and open-source software) project aimed at language enthusiasts, specifically those in the relatively niche hobby of creating constructed languages (“conlangs”). Lexicanter is a cross-platform desktop app available for macOS, Windows, and Linux users, from lexicanter.com. In addition to maintaining the desktop app, I run a small cloud service so that users can sync their language files between devices and view them online by visiting saturnine.xyz/lexicanter/cloud. Additionally, I’ve created a plugin for Obsidian which allows the files to be displayed correctly within Obsidian, and I also have created Discord bot which allows users to interact with their files from within Discord.

Work Experience

Mobile Delivery, LLC

Position: Driver (March 2025 – Present)

• Transitioned from previous company to this role in order to focus on education

Bear Express, LLC

Position: Dispatcher (August 2024 – March 2025)

• Promoted to this role
• Responsible for overseeing the activities of 20 to 40 employees daily
  • Ensured company targets were being met
  • Ensured employees followed company policies for execution and safety
  • Created and managed a large system of spreadsheets to track operations
  • Tracked and managed the state of a fleet of delivery vehicles
  • Coordinated with warehouse staff for route fulfillment and to solve technical issues
  • Coached employees through on-the-job issues which arose and responded to on-the-road emergency situations when they occurred
  • Created multiple reports on daily operations for the review of higher managers
  • Frequent 50+ hour work weeks

Position: Driver (July 2023 – August 2024)

• Amazon delivery fulfillment via DSP