Hey guys! Thought that for my first post, I'd talk a little bit about what got me into language and ultimately, into GSE.

I was born in Poland and came to the U.S. with my parents at the age of one. We moved into a very Polish community in Brooklyn, NY and have lived there ever since. Because nearly all of my neighbors and cousins in Brooklyn spoke Polish, I was not exposed to a monolingual English environment until kindergarten at age 5, which is when I started transitioning to English as the main language of communication with my peers. At some point, during my visits to Poland every summer, I started paying attention to how my personality seemed to change along with the language I was speaking at the time, and was fascinated by the shifts in humor and affect I associated with English and Polish.

I studied Linguistics and Comparative Literature at UPenn because I wanted to understand how the structure of language and the structure of stories could be related. I was interested in how the syntax of a certain language could affect the way you structure the world around you, so I took many descriptive and theoretical Linguistics courses in order to learn how to conceptualize language. What I ended up delving most deeply into, however, was language acquisition. I studied Hindi for three years and began TA-ing Beginning Hindi courses my sophomore year. I also served as the Program Coordinator for a summer intensive Hindi class for high school students at UPenn. In my experience with learning and teaching Hindi, I became more passionate about new teaching strategies, using metalinguistic discussion in the classroom, and issues surrounding Less Commonly Taught Languages.

I applied to GSE because I wanted to explore Linguistics in a way that wasn’t merely descriptive. And because I wanted to see how theoretical Linguistics could be applied in the classroom to make students curious about the versatility and creativity of language. I plan to pursue a Ph.D. studying bilingualism and cognition to explore a question I have been trying to answer for years: what changes in your perception of the world when you inhabit more than one language?