Banana Slugs moving on

As the academic year comes to a close, we’re proud to celebrate our graduating students and recent alumni as they embark on their next steps in linguistics and beyond. This year, Banana Slugs are headed to a variety of excellent graduate programs, fellowships, and professional opportunities. Whether continuing to pursue research in linguistics or exploring new paths and territories, our students carry with them the skill and curiosity honed at UCSC to their next chapters. Congratulations to all — we can’t wait to see where your journeys take you!

Katie Arnold, MA program at University of British Columbia

This fall, I will be joining the UBC Department of Linguistics as a MA student! I’ll be working with Dr. Anne-Michelle Tessier in her Child Phonology Lab. I’m looking forward to this opportunity to continue developing my research skills and learning about linguistics.

Jackson Confer, Baggett Fellowship and PhD Program at the University of Maryland 

After taking a break from my studies for a year, I decided to apply for the Baggett Fellowship at University of Maryland. After spending some time here, I completely fell in love with the department; when it came time to apply to grad schools this cycle, I already knew that I wanted to stay. I really appreciate the explicit marriage between formal and experimental approaches here and the extensive cross-talk that comes with that. In the fellowship, I’ve mostly been doing formal work on the syntax of exceptives and coordination, but I plan to add an experimental dimension to this work as I transition into the PhD program.

Andrew Kato, PhD Program at UCLA

With a strong history of research in formal semantics and the syntax-semantics interface, I’ll be heading to UCLA as a PhD student starting Fall ’25. The department’s large size even beyond its s-side faculty also makes for a good opportunity to explore lingering interests of mine in other subfields, mainly computational linguistics and philosophy of language.

Sadie Lewis, Baggett Fellowship at the University of Maryland, PhD program at University of Chicago

During my Baggett Fellowship I worked with Masha Polinsky mainly doing fieldwork on Kaqchikel (Mayan). I started working on negation in that language which was my main project. I stayed another semester on her grant “Variations in Exceptive Structures” and completed a project on Thai. Now I am working with Hedde Zeijlstra to work more on negation in Mayan. I will spend the summer in Göttingen and do some work on his ERC grant “Unpacking Paradigmatic Gaps”. Additionally, I have accepted a place at University of Chicago for a PhD in linguistics. I will start this Fall. I am hoping to work with Karlos (Arregi) and Erik (Zyman) and continue working on Kaqchikel.

Akira Santerre, Certification of Pre-SLP at CSU San Marcos

Since I’m switching majors from Linguistics to Speech Language Pathology for my Master’s, I enrolled in a Certification of Pre-SLP at CSU San Marcos. It’s like a post-bacc. It’s nice because I can save money by completing all my prerequisite courses online. After I complete this, in a year, I’ll be all set to apply to a regular SLP master’s program. I’m hoping to get into CSU Long Beach. In the meantime, I’m planning to log some observation hours this summer!