My fascination with language has led me down an interesting path since the first time I heard the old Greek men yelling back and forth at one another at Columbus bakery. When you grow up in a conservative upstate New York town, there is never much opportunity for day to day contact between cultures, but as I grew up, I would try to find it anywhere I happened to be. Here I am, all grown up and still with so many questions to ask about language. The classes in Spanish, French, and Greek throughout high school and college hardly managed to quench what I wanted to know. How can we manage and sustain the great diversity of language and culture that exists around the world? There are so many negativities that come to mind before anyone realizes the value of diversity. Politics, economics, religion, education…they all seem so unavoidable. They all have one thing in common though; none of them can exist without language. It is my hope that through establishing a strong background in linguistics and culture, I will be able to gain the knowledge necessary to devise strategies to capitalize on the riches of multilingualism. It is my belief that a well researched language policy can help to align the interests of politics and the people of a nation for the better.

        I have spent a great deal of time considering the road ahead of me, and I have discovered through my reading that the disciplines of sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and anthropology are all unique pieces that must join together in this language planning puzzle. The extreme diversity of western Africa provides an ideal template to research the effects that language policy can have on the governing bodies and the people of a nation. I have spent many months studying the Senari language alongside a native speaker. His passion and will to spread literacy to his people has given me great inspiration as I have assisted him in the analysis of discourse structure of previously unrecorded material in his language. While some individuals are interested in either a programmatic or pragmatic approach to language planning, I hope to take both methods in account so as to have the most sustainable and favorable outcome that can be possible.

        My unusual educational background has provided me with valuable skills that will only help to strengthen my further studies. It took many hours of discussion and months of reflection before I realized that my degrees in music performance and biochemistry would not be a hindrance to my future. I was fortunate to have met Dr. Kathryn Josserand, a linguistic anthropologist at Florida State University and to have been steered in the right direction in my pursuit of linguistic knowledge. Over the past year, I have had weekly meetings with Dr. Josserand to discuss a multitude of linguistic topics from readings that I have been assigned. She has tutored me in discourse structure, phonetics, and morphology and has supervised my individual work on the discourse analysis of French fables and stories. Among my additional long term assignments is an active review of books and articles in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics as an attempt to compensate for materials that I would have learned as an undergraduate linguistics major. I have discovered that the time I spent conducting biological research after I graduated can only assist me in my ability to ask valuable questions and to solve problems in a methodical way. My experiences in music have also trained me to be an intent listener, a creative teacher, and how to speak and perform in front of others. These skills are all invaluable to one interested in language planning. This job takes a special kind of person, one with passion, drive, creativity, and the ability to solve problems.