Undergraduate Research Scholarship and Creative Activities 

Every summer Bloomsburg University offers a scholarship called URSCA (see above). It is to give undergraduates an opportunity to acquaint themselves with research methodology and network with academics in their fields. I received the scholarship last year in 2014, and I received it again this year. Last year's project was titled "Linguistic Relativity Demonstrated by the Effect of Culture on  Color Categorization" (see picture below). I used rhetoric surrounding Sapir/Whorf hypothesis (weak version) that the language you speak has an influence on the way you perceive the world around you. That was more a psycholinguistics issue (wasn't so interested in that).

This summer's research is titled "Investigating Language, Gender, and Identity Formation in Central PA Drag Queens". I'm doing a linguistic ethnography of drag queen lexicon. Wow, I get to do research on drag queens, and get paid for it!? My dream come true! This is more of a sociolinguistic issue; we are examining how a subgroup of an already marginalized community uses particular language to indicate that they are members of a particular community. I am looking forward to meeting lots of queens and having fun while doing research! See? Learning can be fun and rewarding! Please comment if you have any questions.