Hi there! I’m Nikki, a 21 years old linguistics student at Leiden University, and the upcoming semester I will be doing an internship at LeidenGlobal from Februay 1st. In my free time (which I hope I will still have left besides the internship) I love Salsa dancing. I managed to turn my hobby into a job because I’m now assisting the Salsa teacher at the USC.
For my bachelors I did both Descriptive Linguistics and Language and Communication. Both of those tracks are more related to culture than they might seem at first sight. In communication our culture and common shared knowledge plays a huge part, for example when saying something implicit. In Descriptive Linguistics you learn about how different languages around the world work. Having a completely different culture, people around the world express themselves differently, with not only a very different lexicon but also different grammatical systems. This way, language, worldview and culture are tightly intertwined.
After my Bachelor I started my Masters in Applied Linguistics in September 2020. Soon I realised I missed some extra challenge, which is why I started looking for an internship.
Doing this internship in communication at LeidenGlobal again gives me the opportunity to turn two things I love into a job; language and culture. I’m exited to put the knowledge I gained in the past few years to use at this internship and get some experience ‘in the workplace’ (a.k.a. still at home because of corona).
Nikki Schotman