Biographical sketch

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I'm a fourth-year graduate student in the Linguistics Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I'm originally from Endwell, a town (actually, an incorporated settlement) outside of Binghamton in central New York, that owes its name to a shoe once produced by Endicott-Johnson shoe factory. An only child, I was born and raised by two high school teachers. After graduating from high school in 2001, I attended the University at Albany, where I majored in linguistics and minored in anthropology. Since UAlbany doesn't have a graduate program in linguistics, Lee Bickmore and Aaron Broadwell treated me like a graduate student and helped me to begin learning how to do linguistic research. Their tutelage and letters of recommendation helped me make it to UMass, where I have been since 2004.