FYI: The blog has moved to a new address!

This is a reminder that the USC Linguistics Department blog has moved to our new home at USCling! Thanks for following us on SCROLL. If you want to continue receiving notifications about new posts, please follow us at USCling. See you there!
-The Editors

Hey everyone! We have a new blog address: please visit us at USC Ling https://uscling.wordpress.com/

And here’s what is going on in our department this week:

USC is sending several presenters to NELS at Concordia University in Montreal: Jessica Harmon, Alfredo Garcia-Pardo, Brian Hsu, Lanko Marusic, and Charlie O'Hara!

Monday, October 12

Phon Lunch, 11am in the Conference Room: Charlie O'Hara on "Harmony in Harmonic Grammar by reevaluating faithfulness" 

Colloquium, 3:30pm in the Conference Room : Sam Tilsen (Cornell University) will be presenting on Selection-coordination theory. Reception to follow.

Tuesday, October 13
Phon Lunch, 2:30pm in the Conference Room: Hayeun Jang on "Super cumulative OCP effect in Swedish" 

Notification about the Alumni in Industry event:
The event has been moved to November 30th (it has originally been scheduled for November 2nd). It will still be held after colloquium reception, from 7pm to no later than 8:30pm in the linguistics department conference room. Here's a reminder of the plan for this event:
The linguistics department will be hosting a professionalization event for graduate students to talk to recent graduates of the department who have secured jobs outside of academia. Topics of discussion include day-to-day job duties, necessary skills, how linguistic expertise is applied, and how non-academic positions are found. There will also be a Q&A session. Additional details about the event, including the list of participating graduates in industry, will be provided soon.

Reminder: LING4Change!

Don’t forget that we have put up collection boxes in the student’s lounge to gather donations for the Downtown Women’s Center! Clothing & Accessories (laundered, folded, and in good condition) are more than welcome, as well as donations of food and personal hygiene items.
We also have a box to collect commonly used items for recycling that are not recyclable by municipal programs so we can take those to Terracycle: any old Brita filters, used toothbrushes, cereal bar wrappers, snack bags and broken pens are welcome to this box!

Weekly Digest!

Hi folks! Here's a preview of what has happened/will be happening this week:

USC is sending a delegation of presenters to the Annual Meeting in Phonology in Vancouver: Peter Guekguezian, Karen Jesney, Caitlin Smith, and Rachel Walker. USC alum Michal Temkin Martinez (Boise State University) will also be presenting at this meeting. Next year we will be hosting Phonology at USC!

Monday, October 5

Syntax +, 3:15pm in the Conference Room: Chorong Kang gave a poster presentation on "Covert movement, audible in prosody". Alfredo Garcia Pardo gave a practice talk for NELS titled: "Decomposing the VP: Aspect, argument structure and the instrumental-subject alternation".

Tuesday, October 6

Phon Lunch, 2:30pm in the Conference Room: Meeting to discuss preliminary organization plans for next year's Annual Meeting in Phonology.

Thursday, October 8

Tea Time! 3:30pm in the Linguistics Department.

Friday, October 9

The first annual USC Hearing and Communication Neuroscience Symposium at Herkholtz Auditorium, in the Health Sciences Campus (more information on the post below!)

We are currently making changes to our blog! If you’d like to help edit SCROLL, please send us an email. If you have any information that we could include in future posts, please send those as well!

Hearing and Communication Neuroscience Symposium this Friday, October 9th!

This is the first annual HCN Symposium

There is a fantastic lineup of speakers, and of course the HCN Training Program wants to put their best foot forward by having a great turnout. Lunch will be provided. The event will be held on the Health Sciences Campus, at the Zilkha Neurogenetics Institute (ZNI) in the Herklotz Auditorium. Everyone is invited!

Linguists presenting at the Center for Excellence in Teaching

Two professors from the Linguistics Department are presenting during Academic Careers Week (September 28 - October 1), organized by the Center for Excellence in Teaching. On Monday, Sept. 28, Professor Rachel Walker presented "Writing Your Cover Letter & CV." On Wed, Sept. 30, Professor Dani Byrd will present "Negotiating the Academic Job Offer."  Lunch is provided. More information is available at the CET website.

Several USC linguists are representing the department in the CET this year. Ed Finegan, Professor of Linguistics and Law, is the Director of the CET. Rachel Walker is a Faculty Fellow, and Canan Ipek is a TA Fellow. The CET is looking for Graduate students who are interested in being involved in the CET as a TA Fellows. Interested students are encouraged to apply to the TA Fellows program. Talk with Rachel Walker to find out more!

Welcome (Back) Picnic, Fall 2015

This past Saturday, September 12, was GSIL's annual Welcome (Back) picnic. The event was held in the Old Zoo area of Griffith Park, on an uncharacteristically muggy (for LA) day. Grad students, their significant others and pets, and USC linguistics alumni all came out and enjoyed the outdoors. Rousing games of Kubb and Jenga were played! Delicious food was enjoyed! Some highlights are on view below. Thanks to our GSIL Event Coordinators, Maury and Ana, for putting together this fun event.

The group gathers around our picnic table

L-R: Jessica, Monica, Thomas, Brian and Caitlin; starting a game of Jenga

Monica and Thomas with Jenga aftermath

Caitlin with her dog, Kirby

L-R: Sarah, Brian, Ana, Maury, Andrés, & Jesse; playing Kubb 

Summer 2015 (and beyond) updates from Faculty and Students

Welcome back from summer break, everyone! The Fall 2015 semester is already off to a great start. Many people in the USC Linguistics community had a busy Spring and Summer 2015, so we'll share their updates here.

Sierra Chinn-Liu
A recent graduate of the Linguistics BA program at USC, Sierra was recently accepted to UCLA's very prestigious Law School. Congratulations, Sierra!

Sandy Disner
Professor Disner was interviewed by USA Today in June for a story about the National Spelling Bee and the value of spelling in the age of spell-check.

Professor Disner was also a discussant in the "Session on Forensic Phonetics and Speaker Characteristics" presented by Professor Francis Nolan of Cambridge University at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Glasgow, Scotland in August.

Hajime Hoji
Professor Hoji is back at USC after his time off, and he has exciting news. He has finished writing a book on his research, Language Faculty Science, and it will be published soon. Follow the link to order your copy from Amazon.

Roumyana Pancheva
Professor Pancheva was an invited speaker at the workshop "Gradability, Scale Structure and Vagueness: Experimental Perspectives" in Madrid in May. Her talk was on "Cardinality Comparison and Plurality: The Processing of Comparative Illusions." She has also provided some lovely pictures (below) from her sightseeing in Madrid.

Parque del Retiro in Madrid, Spain

Plaza Mayor in Madrid, Spain

In July, Professor Pancheva taught a class on Quantifier Raising at the St. Petersburg Institute of Linguistics, Cognition, and Culture (NYI) at St. Petersburg State University in Russia.

Lastly, Professor Pancheva gave a workshop on "Patterns and Models of Semantic Change" during the 22nd International Conference on Historical Linguistics in Naples.

Saurov Syed
Graduate student Saurov spent much of the Spring 2015 semester traveling to present at conferences.  First up, he presented a talk called "Decomposing Definiteness: arguments for a split D-Domain in Bangla" at WCCFL 33, hosted by Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.

Saurov presenting at WCCFL 33 in March

Then, Saurov gave a poster presentation entitled "Is there a lexical distinction between lower and higher numerals in Bangla?" at FASAL 5, hosted by Yale University. 

Finally, Saurov presented a talk called "Definiteness in terms of Identifiablity and Inclusiveness: Splitting the D-domain in Bangla"  at CLS 51 hosted by the University of Chicago.


Congratulations to all of our students and faculty on an extremely productive spring and summer. We're looking forward to all of the updates that Fall 2015 will bring!

Welcome to the new cohort!

We are so happy to introduce the new cohort of Linguistics graduate students at USC: Welcome, class of 2020!

Betül Erbaşı

Hi! My name is Betul (with a high front round vowel in Turkish). I am from Turkey and so far I have spent all of my life there. I had my BA in Foreign Language Education and MA in Linguistics, both from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul.  My main linguistic interest lies in the interfaces of prosody with other parts of Language, especially syntax. To that end, my MA thesis focused on prosodic and morpho-syntactic structure (and their interaction) of a reduplication case in Turkish. I am also interested in other sub-fields of linguistics that relate to sound, such as phonology and phonetics. Actually, phonology and phonetics were what drew me into linguistics as a field in the first place, besides historical linguistics. So, I still love them all!

What do I love other than languages? Watching films is becoming more and more of a passion for me (which is why I think I made the right decision by coming to LA!). I also like walking, exercising (not professionally, though), listening to music. Lately, I do not know why but I have started liking cooking. In real life, I like combining the things I like doing. For example, I often exercise or even cook while watching films! For me, this brings more joy to these activities and saves time! This is the first time I will be living in a foreign country for such a long time and I am really curious what kind of experiences I will have. From what I have seen so far at USC and LA in general, it seems that wounderful times are awaiting me! Glad to be at USC and LA!

Tanner Sorensen

My name is Tanner Sorensen and I am from Omaha, Nebraska. I was an undergrad at the University of Nebraska from 2010 to 2013 before I did the MSc Linguistics at the University of Potsdam from 2013 to 2015. 

I am wrapping up three research projects right now. First, my thesis with Adamantios Gafos analyzed the primitive units of speech production as dynamical systems. I presented this work at the Second Workshop on Dynamical Modeling at the University of Cologne. A second project involved assessing the influence of two tongue movements on one another when they are produced in overlapping time intervals but with different functional segments of the tongue. This work was presented at the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Glasgow. Third, I did some work with Shravan Vasishth for the 2nd Bayesian Young Statisticians Meeting in Vienna which resulted in a tutorial on linear mixed effects models in the Bayesian setting. I'm looking forward to getting started at USC, learning some new things, and taking my work in some new directions. 

Yifan Yang

My name is Yifan Yang (I think I have to reverse the order of my names in order to indicate Yifan is my first name), and I believe my name is much easier for you to pronounce than other Chinese names. I was born in a small city in North China, and have got a Bachelor of Arts in Tianjin and an MA in linguistics in Shanghai (by the way, Tianjinese is quite famous for its complicated tone sandhi pattern, but I think I am a successful Tianjinese learner!). As for my field of study, I mainly focus on phonology, especially Chinese segmental phonology. Previously, I worked on a special phenomenon called ‘rime change’. This phenomenon exclusively exists on the boundary of Shanxi Plateau and North China Plain, which was my birthplace, and it has phonetic, phonological, morphological and even sociolinguistic significance. I am now quite excited about joining this program of linguistics. I hope I could move further on this topic and I am also looking forward to doing more research on other varieties of Chinese, including Mandarin. I used to be a violin player but have not played it for quite a long time (that is a pity). I also enjoy running. Hope I could finish a half marathon and then a full marathon in the future! Nice to meet you all!

Jesse Storbeck

Hello! I'm Jesse, originally of the western Philadelphia suburbs. I graduated from Yale University in 2011 with a double major in linguistics and classics. My focus as an undergrad was on the development of the ancient Indo-European languages, with particular attention to the morphological systems of Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. After I graduated, I worked as an English teacher in Seoul, South Korea and later as a paralegal at a criminal defense law firm in New York City. After a few years outside of academia, I decided that I wanted to go back to school in linguistics and, in particular, that I wanted to work in a more experimental/quantitative subfield than Indo-European studies. I'm currently most interested in first language acquisition and psycholinguistics, with a focus on morphology and syntax. When I'm not working, I love being outdoors. I'm especially fond of hiking and road cycling. I'm working on becoming a better bicycle mechanic and considering participating in some amateur racing... if I can get myself in shape. In addition, I recently adopted a cat, so I spend a good bit of time hanging out with her. Her name is Lucinda (after the song by Tom Waits), and she is a six-year-old medium-haired tortoiseshell. I'm really excited to be joining a department as talented and welcoming as USC's!

Sarah Harper

My name is Sarah, and I grew up in southeastern Michigan (although I’m originally from New York, which is why I have weird diphthongs). I graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.A. in Linguistics and Spanish in 2014, and then spent a year working as an English teacher at an elementary school in northern Spain.

Research-wise, my focus is on phonetics and (laboratory) phonology. Right now I'm particularly interested in phonetic gradiency and variation, and in non-native speech production. My undergraduate honors thesis examined patterns of phonetic influence in third language acquisition through an acoustic study on voiced stop production by Portuguese learners; I'm currently working on a follow-up to that study that additionally looks at L3 effects on the L2. Outside of linguistics, I enjoy cooking and baking, singing, going for epically long walks and drinking lots and lots of coffee.

Recent USC Linguistics News

Hello everyone-

We are really pleased to report some great news from one of our USC Linguistics alumna:

Michal Temkin Martínez (PhD, 2010) was recently promoted to the rank of Associate Professor, with tenure, at Boise State University.

Way to go Michal!

But wait, there is more-

Check out this video, posted earlier this week on the Dornsife homepage, which features undergraduate Linguistics alumna Evangeline Alva and Dr. Khalil Iskarous discussing the documentation of an endangered language in Taiwan.

USC Presence @ 2nd Conference of the American Pragmatics Association on October 17 and 18

Professor Elsi Kaiser and graduate student Aninha Vianna (Ana) presented their work at the 2nd conference of the American Pragmatics Association (AMPRA), held October 17-19 at UCLA. Elsi presented "Richness of the Paradigm: Crosslinguistic Investigations of Reference Resolution" and Ana presented her work "There was... something new! Discourse-based Predictions During Language Comprehension", developed from her MA thesis at SDSU. Congratulations to both of them! Some pics below (courtesy of Ana).

 Ana presenting her work.

Elsi presenting her work (she looks small in the pic, but you can still tell it's her :))

The OIS Language Learning Workshop

On November 20th, professor Elsi Kaiser, along with many of our graduate students, put together the Language Learning Workshop at the Parkside Performance Cafe at the University Park Campus  This was an initiative of the Office of the International Students as part of their International Education Week, and the goal was to give students the chance to learn key phrases (eg. Hello, goodbye, what's your name?) in as many different languages as possible. 

The graduate students that participated, and the respective languages they represented, were the following: Thomas Borer (German), Sierra Chinn-Liu (Hawaiian Pidgin), Bharati Dash (Hindi), Alfredo Garcia-Pardo (Spanish), Peter Guekguezian (Western Armenian), Chorong Kang (Korean), Maury Lander-Portnoy (Hebrew), Aninha Vianna aka Anna (Brazilian Portuguese), Xin Zhao (Mandarin Chinese) and Margil (Tagalog). Last, but not least, professor Elsi Kaiser represented her native language Finnish, and she also put together a great workshop by bringing volunteers together, taking care of the handouts and chairing the workshop to ensure it was a complete success, as it was. Thank you to everybody and let's try to do it again!

Below are some pictures of the event, courtesy of Ana.

 Since she took them, I thought Ana should come first in the battery of pics.

  Maury speaking (beginner) Hebrew to Alfredo and a non-linguistics participant.

  Ulli chairing her super crowded German table.

  An overview of the venue.

  Interested in learning Bangla? Go to Saurov's table!

  A busy table, where Western Armenian, Finnish, Hindi and Korean are being learned at the same time :)

 If you want to learn the language with the most native speakers, go to Xin! 

Sam receives award for excellence in teaching

Congratulations to our grad student Sam for being named Outstanding TA by the Center for Excellence in Teaching! 

This honor is given to graduate teaching assistants who exhibit consistent excellence in the classroom and symbolize the University's dedication to the education of scholar-teachers. Check out the full list of winners here.

Keep making us proud Sam!

The Furball Diaries : Furrytail, Ninja and Smoky

We're back– and this time we get to meet all three furry companions of Andrew Simpson, Chair of our USC Linguistics Department. 

Our Chair loves his cats.

 "This is Furrytail, who we found living in a car park behind a Chinese restaurant. He decided to come home with us and changed our lives.  Furrytail lights up our lives with his affection and charm, but also worries us when he goes out adventuring far away after dark.  Born in the wild, he hates being confined, but is so happy to have a home.  He also likes to ride in cars, just like a dog, and accompanies me every night to Starbucks."












"This is Ninja the Magnificent, also known as the Black Knight, Sir Ninja Naughtyfellow, faithful defender of Lord Furrytail, who looked after him lovingly as a kitten.  When any bigger neighborhood cats try to menace Furrytail, Ninja gallops in and sends them running away with his Shaolin-style kungfu skills. Ninja also enjoys shredding paper, in particular any paper with the words ‘midterm’ written on it."












"This is Smoky, who was found as a very small kitten in a park.  Now also known as Sir Smoky Snugglesworth, he loves to snuggle with us at any time of day or night.  After dark, he gingerly follows his braver adopted brothers into all our neighbors’ gardens. However, he is most happy when it’s time to watch TV and sit on a welcoming lap with a very big grin on his face."

The Furball Diaries : Leo

Hello again everyone, this week let us introduce Leo, Roumi's lovely cat.

"This is Leo Panski. He met us at the South LA pound 10 years ago - he was a tiny 2-month-old kitten then - and insisted we take him home. He is strong-willed, curious yet also cautious, affectionate, playful, and friendly with people, especially small ones, but a menace to other cats. He loves being outside, and always complains when he has to come home at night. When he was younger, he loved to climb trees and chase squirrels, but now he is more mellow. He still loves hiding in boxes."

On Leave

A number of our esteemed faculty are taking a break from the rigors of teaching and administration so they can focus on their work. In this post, we highlight the goings-on of Hajime Hoji and Khalil Iskarous.

Hajime Hoji

Hajime was at Yokohama, Japan, in September, where he participated in a small workshop on Language Faculty Science. He also gave a talk titled "Language Faculty Science as an Exact Science: An Illustration based on Experimental Considerations" at Kanagawa University, on the 11th of that month.

In February-May of 2015, he will be visiting Kyoto University, Japan, to disseminate the idea of Language Faculty Science in Japan.

In the meantime, his book "Language Faculty Science" is closer and closer to being fully cooked and taken out of the oven for everyone to enjoy! He also intends to write "Introduction to Language Faculty Science" as an experimental follow-up for the former book. If anyone is interested in the content of his book, the "Remarks" board under "Discussion" at his homepage (http://www.gges.org/hoji/) contains some info about it.

Khalil Iskarous

Khalil is taking the traditional fourth-year leave that comes in the middle of the USC's six-year tenure process. The point of this leave is to prepare the dossier for tenure; for Khalil, this neatly coincides with the third year of his NSF grant, which is the year when most writing gets done.

This summer, Khalil and his team took a cinematic trip to Japan, where they collected video footage of octopodes. Khalil hopes that the movement of octopus tentacles (and other octopus behavior) will give us insight about the reciprocal relationship between biomechanics and phonological tasks--and so far, the results are quite promising.

Email Khalil if you'd like to hear more about his work. Ask to see an octopus video; those little guys are incredible.

The Furball Diaries: Caeser and Maia

Welcome back to our ongoing series featuring the pets of USC Linguistics students, faculty and staff. This week we greet the cats of Rachel's household.

"This is Maia. Maia is a rescue cat, adopted about one year ago. She is hard to capture on film, because she is always on the move, except when she’s sleepy. Maia is super-petite, an aerialist, and loves to play with cherry tomatoes. She has no fear, and takes on her big brother, Caesar, without hesitation."

"This is Caesar. Caesar and Maia are rescue siblings (not related, but reared together). He is just over a year old, but a giant among cats. Caesar is usually mellow, but occasionally a wild streak comes out in him.  He is a master of string play and hide and seek. He is very smart, and good at learning new games. He has a special talent for jumps where he bounces sideways off the wall."

The Furball Diaries: Pearl, Shadow and Grey

This week, we will get to know Afton's feathered friends.

"Pictured are Pearl, Shadow, and Grey, and not pictured are the other four members of their little flock (Pippin, Noodle, Beetle, and Lucky). They enjoy singing, talking, hiding in my hair, stealing shiny objects, and attempting to communicate with the crows that live outside. We've been friends for over 15 years now, and I've seen many of them grow up from egg to adult."

The Furball Diaries : Pip and Max

Welcome to the first installment of USCLing Pets, the photo series! A proud pet parent from the USC Linguistics department will have their furry loved one featured each week.

Today we will feature Samantha Gordon's four-legged friends, Pip and Max. Sam describes the pictured interaction as either an instance of Pipsqueak using Maxine as a pillow or of Max using Pip as a blanket. We'll let you make up your mind on that one.

"Pipsqueak and Maxine are my cats. They're part of a larger multi-cat household involving a lot of big personalities, but they hold their own. I adopted Pip when she was just a tiny 2-month-old kitten that my friend found under a house. Pip's favorite activities are snuggling in weird positions, chasing the reflection of polished surfaces on walls, getting cat hair on clean laundry, and catching bugs. She got her name because she really does squeak! Max is Pip's younger sister from a different litter. She is the fluffiest cat of the house and she is often mistaken for a show cat because of her good looks. We thought Max was a boy for the first few months we had her because she was too fluffy to tell. Max loves eating yogurt and helps me with my reading by sitting on my book and meowing to get petted. They are both integral figures in my life, and they're always there for me to help me through tough times."

Welcome to our new students!

It is with great pleasure that we introduce the new cohort of Linguistics graduate students, so that you can all get to know them a bit better. Welcome, class of 2019!

Ana Elisa Besserman 

Hi! My name is Ana Besserman, I'm from Brazil and I'm terribly excited to be joining the USC Linguistics department! While living in Rio de Janeiro, I graduated with a BA in Journalism and another in Portuguese & English (running from one University to the other while doing that turned out to be quite a lot of fun). In 2011, I moved to San Diego to pursue a Linguistics MA at SDSU and ended up having an amazing time yet again. For my thesis, I designed and ran a study on discourse-based predictive processes during language comprehension - which brings me to my linguistics interests: sentence processing, experimental pragmatics, discourse, information status and word order (but truly everything else language-wise fascinates me almost just as much). 

What else? I'm a big fan of "that's what she said" jokes (thanks, Michael Scott). Owls are my favorite creatures, but I'd probably be a beaver if I had to be a non-human animal. I had an awful ketchup addiction when I was 7 years old. If Netflix was a place, it would probably be my favorite one. I particularly enjoy watching anything with vampires, Woody Allen and revenge stories, so basically I'm waiting for the day the three will be combined in one glorious, epic movie. I love food (eating, not cooking), sports (watching, not playing) and games (wining, not losing). 

Bhamati Dash

Hye. I am Bhamati Dash. Since many have asked me this after I came here, it starts with an aspirated bilabial voiced plosive and ends with a dental voiceless one. I am from India. My first language is Hindi, the language predominantly spoken in Northern India. I am from the state of Orissa in India( a state in Eastern India) but never having lived there I am not very good at speaking Odia. I plan to improve on it here! Not because there are so many who speak that language here because there aren't but because my research is in Odia and I cannot stay away from it any longer.

I did my graduation and post graduation from The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. ( same place as Mythili and Saurav).

Currently my interest is tipped towards syntax. I plan to work on Plural Expressions in Classifier languages. But I am hoping to find something new here which will catch my attention so that I could diversify my area of interest.

Really excited to be here.

Hayeun Jang

I’m Hayeun Jang from South Korea. My lovely cats’ names are Luffy and Hancock (I took their names from the Japanese manga ‘Onepiece’). Yes. I’m a cat lover, but unfortunately my husband is allergic to cat’s fur.. T^T So they are living with my parents now.

Nowadays I’m fascinated by articulation and perception of nasals, and I’m interested in the phenomenon named ‘spontaneous nasalization’. So I will focus on P-side linguistics, but I love other subfields of linguistics.

Nice to meet you all, and be friends :)

Maury Lander-Portnoy

My name is Maury and I'm from Baltimore, Maryland.  I went to undergrad at Haverford College in the suburbs of Philadelphia where I graduated with a degree in Linguistics and Languages, which was a linguistics degree with an additional curriculum of 2 foreign languages, which for me were Mandarin and Arabic (My apologies for being a linguist who asking "oh, how many languages do you know?" is a good question: these two joined Hebrew, Spanish, and Latin).  Linguistically, I'm interested in Phonetics, Phonology, Psycholinguistics, and Endangered Language Documentation, with my thesis being a Phonetic sketch of an Endangered language from northeast India called Bugun.

Extralinguistically, last year I took a gap year to first work at the summer camp I attended as a child, then I went to Ireland and Spain to travel and WWOOF (volunteer on small organic farms).  Then I had to come back and help my grandparents move into a retirement community up in Massachusetts (for those of you who didn't travel to the east coast last year, it was absolutely freezing, which is part of the reason why I am so excited about LA's weather!).  After that, I traveled to visit family and stayed for a bit with my parents, who now live in Dallas, TX, before coming here to work for the summer.

For fun, I LOVE cooking (and eating too!), and growing my own produce, although I'm unsure whether I'll get much opportunity to do that in the city (I'll try herbs on my balcony).  I love music, singing (solo or a cappella), and playing the guitar although music is less of a hobby and more of a perpetual state of being, manifested in constant singing and listening to music.  To stay active, I enjoy swimming (another reason I'm excited about LA-year round outdoor swimming), hiking, and occasionally running.  And to stay inactive, I like playing video games and watching movies.