What am I about?

I had to write this post this week for LSH 498 at Charter Oak State College. It is the first small step toward completion of my capstone and graduation. Who doesn't need to jolt out a purpose statement like this at least once a year?

What are you about?

My name is Nathan Straub. I am 23 years old, and I have six younger sisters and one younger brother. In my free time, I am a violinist and an avid researcher. In fact, my first year of college I studied to be a paralegal.

Three years ago I volunteered as an English teacher in Taiwan; my time with the Chinese-speaking students there awakened a long-held desire to learn as much as I could about language, and to use linguistic tools to serve people from other cultures in areas like language teaching, sociolinguistic survey, or Scripture translation.

Right now I am taking Spanish as part of my concentration, and after graduation I want to learn Chinese and Hebrew. Ultimately I would love to do a doctorate in linguistics. I realize this is ambitious, especially since I will be the first in my family to graduate from college. But my family has been very supportive, especially my mom, who dropped out of Oregon College of Education to get married in 1979 and taught me at home from kindergarten through high school. My dad is very encouraging as well, and he has included me in countless discussions and projects, on the berry farm, in the cabinet shop, and during our house remodel, to teach me common sense and uncommon persistence.



What is this course about?

LSH 498 is a 5-week pass/fail course designed to guide me through the process of defending the outcomes of my concentration and crafting a proposal for a capstone project such as a senior thesis based on those outcomes.

In order to pass the course, I need to demonstrate three specific competencies in each of the five outcome areas outlined in the course policies. Competency will be assessed based on my posts on this forum and my project proposal.

I will need to identify and justify the appropriate outcomes for my concentration, explain how my concentration met those outcomes, and write a proposal that focuses the skills and knowledge I have gained through my concentration into an important project.

The proposal for the project should communicate clear goals and a realistic timetable, as well as relevance and sound methodology.



What is your concentration about?

My concentration reflects two major interests: literature and linguistics. I used the GRE Literature in English test to demonstrate my competence in literary history and analysis. Then I studied the history of the English language, and the history of the Old Testament, to provide further background in the literature I value most.

I took Spanish as a way to meet the foreign language requirement for grad school, and simply to expand the number of people and writings with which I can converse. The linguistic tools I have studied include phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, sociolinguistics, and second language acquisition.

Although I’m very interested in the history of ideas as expressed in literature, the “big picture” of culture, I feel I must earn the right to be heard in these “soft” areas by working hard at the details of linguistic description and textual analysis. For the capstone project, I hope to use these tools and background to analyze a significant historical text.