About Me

I grew up near, and went to school in inner-city Seattle, and was on the Certamen team for Garfield High School’s Junior Classical League. It was when I started taking Latin that I really got interested in linguistics.

Seattle, view from near my neighborhood.

Garfield High School, Home of the Bulldogs, Junior Classical League Convention

I graduated high school after my junior year, and took a year “off” to be an exchange student in Wesel, Germany. I knew no German going in, and by the time I came back, I was fluent. Although, at times, this was a frustrating experience, I experienced what it was like to, mostly instinctively, pick up a second language. This expanded my desire to learn about languages, now, more than ever, wanting to learn about the actual learning and understanding of language, not just the roots and grammar.

Me and my host cousins

The exchange students from Seattle, Finland, and California, only days before we had to leave the country we had called home for the past year.

Me and my host family.

I learned to ride a bike everywhere, even in the snow. I still do use my bike as a primary mode of transportation.

While I was in Germany, I took advantage of where I was (on the Rhine, near an old Roman settlement) to see actual Roman runes!

My Sophomore and Junior years I have spent living in the German House.

My sophomore year, I went abroad to Norway during interim. I had been teaching myself the language for about a year at that point; reading grammar books, studying pronoun charts, going to conversation table and by reading Harry Potter. I read straight through the first five books, without much trouble. I found it very interesting how my knowledge of German made it so easy for me to understand, especially written, Norwegian.

All of us Oles on a Spark (a sled-type thing Norwegians use instead of bikes in the winter).

The arctic cathedral in Tromsø, Norway.

The view from outside of the dormitories.

The largest mountain near Tromsø

In my personality psychology class sophomore year, the professor picked a random example of a rare(ish) heritable psychological condition. “Did you know that some people associate letters with colors? Every time they think of a letter, it has a color? That’s called synesthesia, and it’s a heritable trait…” Up until that point, I had no idea that what I had was not normal. As soon as class was over, I rushed to a computer to research the condition more. After a bit more thought, I realized the potential relationship between synesthesia and psycholinguistics. Maybe this explained my horrible spelling! See the "Synesthesia" section for more info and pictures!

Since high school, I have volunteered and worked at The Museum of Flight in Seattle. I have been amazed by the planes ever since I was a child. After working there, I realized that although my academic interest lies in the realm of psycholinguistics, my passion remains in museums. I have done work at a hand-full of museums, and would like to continue on to combine my interests at a science or history museum, working in the archives, using what I have learned from studying psycholinguistics to help me understand old documents better. Languages are always useful, and the better one can understand the “madness” behind linguistics, the better one can come to understand language itself, in any form.

The Museum of Flight

In the summer of 2008, I interned at the Wewelsburg Museum. This museum is at a castle where Himmler came and built a concentration camp to provide labor for a SS center. I worked in the library, and did research and translated documents for them.

I interned at the Northfield Historical Society, beginning fall 2008.