As a senior in high school I lived in Germany as an exchange student (via the Congress-Bundestag exchange program). As my German skills became more and more proficient I became fascinated with how languages change over time and are related to one another, as English and German have a common ancestor. I chose to attend Wellesley in part because I knew I would be able to learn about linguistics there (with help from its proximity to MIT). I wasn’t sure yet it would be my major, but I knew that I wanted to find out what linguistics was. At the same time, I wanted to expose myself to all the various fields available in a liberal arts education.

While at Wellesley, I constructed my linguistics education in kind of a hodge-podge way. Some classes I took at Wellesley, some at MIT, some at the Goethe Universität in Frankfurt, Germany (where I spent part of my junior year), some at UC Irvine (where I spent the other part of my junior year). I studied Japanese and spent a summer in Japan. I took advantage of all the resources available both at Wellesley and elsewhere. I wrote a senior honors thesis, using some data I had collected from children in Germany during my junior year. During their senior year, everyone asks themselves the question (or they’re asked by someone else), What do I want to do after college? I had an opportunity to take some time off before grad school, but really all I wanted to do was more linguistics! So I went straight to grad school and never regretted it.

As I approached the terrifying academic job market some years later, my father (himself a professor) warned me about the difficulty of finding an academic job, and he encouraged me to switch to a more applied field, such as language teaching. But my heart was in theoretical linguistics and no place else. I told him that I would keep doing linguistics until I couldn’t do it anymore, and then I’d find something else to do. So far I’m still doing linguistics!