Email: kulackia@gmail.com
Comps Title: Dialectal variation in German verb cluster ordering
Current Employment: Associate Director, Nature of Life Program
“Having a background in Linguistics has been immeasurably beneficial for my overall success as a scholar. Crucially, Linguistics offers a unique lens for looking at the world. Being able to think about how language is used and examine how people communicate grants an invaluable perspective to my work in education.
Education is all about making connections between ideas and Linguistics is a fantastic avenue through which to make those connections. I have personally been able to leverage the tools and ideas I developed and learned at Carleton to do cool and exciting things with my students, even though I’m not ’strictly’ doing work in the field of Linguistics.
It’s also genuinely fun to talk to people about language and share with them that perspective, as oftentimes it’s something people take for granted (and who doesn’t love that ‘lightbulb’ moment when you help someone realize a neat thing about language!). A more prosaic tip: to all you syntax-geeks (or freaks, in my case) out there: Be careful! You might just grow out of it. Take some classes on sociolinguistics, semantics, pragmatics, etc… because you might find that WAY cooler in the end.”