Photo provided by Meghan Agnew
Meghan Agnew was taking an intensive language course in Trieste, Italy, when she decided to switch her major from advertising to linguistics. The people around her there only spoke Italian during the four-hour-long daily courses. Agnew said the person who really convinced her to make the switch was her ISU advisor and group leader, Christiana Langenberg. Agnew also said she enjoyed learning a new language because it allowed her to speak to more people. She formed relationships with others that would have been impossible had she only known her native language of English.
Being from the small town of Tonganoxie, Kansas, Agnew felt her experience traveling, learning, and living abroad was deeply formative. “You learn a lot about yourself…. It’s uncomfortable, at first, to be thrown into a new culture and new place,” explained Agnew. But the experience was ultimately a positive one as Agnew has studied abroad three times, including studying in Spain, where she hopes to move and begin teaching after graduation.
Agnew also did two semesters of the Language Partner Exchange Program through the Department of World Languages and Cultures, where she acted as both a teacher and a learner. While learning Spanish with a native speaker, Agnew also helps a native Mandarin Chinese speaker learn English. And Agnew spends parts of the week aiding in language research. In the project she’s working on, researchers are creating a program that can pinpoint the subject of a person’s writing while they are writing it.
When asked for any advice Agnew could give to new students in the Linguistics major, she recommended that they study abroad if possible. “I realized the world is a lot bigger than I had ever imagined and learned a lot about who I am and what is important to me through the trips I’ve been fortunate enough to go on.”