I enrolled for a Master of Arts program in English & American Studies and Print Media Technology at Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany, after graduating from high school (the traditional university degree in Germany leads to a master's degree directly). Two years later, I applied for a Socrates exchange fellowship and my linguistics professor, who saw much linguistic potential in me, decided to send me to the Department of Linguistics at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, for 6 months. With mostly linguistics courses on my schedule and Glaswegian Scots spoken all around me, my enthusiasm for the field of linguistics was kindled during my stay there.

After returning from Scotland, I had the opportunity to teach introductory tutorials in English linguistics, to work as a student research assistant both in linguistics as well as American literature (which I also enjoy thoroughly) and to attend a broad spectrum of linguistics classes ranging from historical linguistics to computational linguistics. In 2005, I went to the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India, as an internee in German language teaching and in order to conduct some research for my M.A. thesis on Student Slang at IIT Madras.

I was very happy to join the MultiTree team in summer 2007 after about a year of abstinence from linguistics since graduation. Initially, my work for MT was restricted to my freetime and conducted from Germany, while I was attending full-time programming classes in Perl, SQL and PHP. I finally joined the LINGUIST List crew in person in January 2008.