I am a first year graduate student in German Applied Linguistics. I received my bachelor of arts degree in German Studies from Penn State in 2004. I earned my master of arts degree in linguistic and literary computing from the Technische Universität Darmstadt in 2009. My master’s thesis, “An Approach to Automatic Theme Annotation” combined computational text processing, systemic functional linguistics, corpus linguistics and register analysis. Before starting my Ph.D. in 2013, I worked as a German-English technical translator.