CURRENT MISSION

Appreciate every minute.

ABOUT ME

Oh, man.

I'm a Ph.D. student working on computational linguistics. In particular, I study conversational language and how people signal their authority, expertise, and confidence when talking to one another in person or in chat rooms.

This job is fantastic in its ability to toss me all over the world for conference or workshop or what have you. I'm perfectly open about the fact that this bribed me into going to grad school in the first place.

In the time not taken up by work, I play board games, make linguistics jokes, cook with friends who are better at cooking than me (secretly turning our hangouts into lessons), and read Wikipedia articles about pop culture so that I can make small talk with strangers.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

I go in spurts of participation within the Pittsburgh CS scene; I'll go months without attending and then I'll show up to everything they do for a month at a stretch. They're the most welcoming people in all of Pittsburgh.

I feel a little guilty about surfing while actually attending conferences, but I try and schedule a day or two at the end of my travels where the university is no longer paying my way into hotels, and I can actually get to meet people and the city they're in.

I'm happy to host whenever possible, and have done so semi-regularly since 2010.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

Meetups and events in Pittsburgh are so varied and arcane as to hardly merit the term "meetup."

As a surfer, I've stayed as far west as Oregon and as far east as Poland.

Interests

Words! Both the sentences they comprise and the etymologies that got them into those sentences in the first place.

People that tell stories or that analyze the stories of others. Special points here to people with poorly developed social filters. They tell even better stories.

Boxes on internet profiles.

As of this summer, music festivals.

• culture
• music festivals
• festivals
• cooking
• board games
• socializing
• music
• surfing

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Moving to Pittsburgh, without a doubt. I grew a little uneasy as I started my senior year of undergrad, decided abruptly to apply to Ph.D. programs, and here I am in this city four years later, surrounded by the best people and talking about the most interesting topics I could ever ask for.

Countries I’ve Visited

Canada, France, Germany, India, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, United Kingdom

Countries I’ve Lived In

United States

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