Congratulations to Claire Laing (BA, Spanish & Linguistics, 2017), who was recently accepted to study the Speech-Language Pathology major in the Department of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology in the Hunter College Graduate Program (NYC). Claire had a difficult decision when it came to deciding where to pursue graduate work: she applied to the most competitive programs in NYC (where she is 
from), and was accepted to all of them! Claire‘s first experience with Spanish Linguistics was in Fall 2015, when she enrolled in Spanish 298 with Lorenzo Garcia-Amaya. Since then, she enrolled in multiple advanced Spanish Linguistics courses in RLL (including an Independent Study in Winter 2017), and participated in the CGIS study-abroad program in Granada, Spain. Claire started working in the lab in Winter 2017. For those of you who are new to the From Africa to Patagonia Collaboratory project, Claire was a key player during the Proposal Development phase (May/June 2017), when she collaborated with Mallory Fuller to analyze the back vowels /a o c/ of the bilingual speakers.
As she transitions to her graduate studies, Claire reflected on the impact of her Collaboratory work on her undergraduate career: “Hunter College really values research work, so I think my time working with the lab and gaining authentic research experience definitely helped my application, and additionally the opportunity to work closely with other graduate students and faculty was an important aspect of the lab that I also think strengthened my application. What I loved about the Collaboratory research most was meeting new people and getting to work side by side with them. I also found the research itself interesting, so the opportunity to come together as a research team and discuss all the work we’d been doing individually and see how it all fit together was a great part of my experience working in the lab.”
Congratulations Claire!