Checking In with Evan D. Hochstein

Evan H. is the winner of a 2019 National Merit $2500 Scholarship underwritten by State Farm Companies Foundation and earned both a bachelor of arts and master of arts degree in linguistics from 耶鲁大学 . While at Yale, Evan served as chair of the North American Computational Linguistics Open (NACLO). "NACLO is a national linguistics competition that introduces high school students to linguistics concepts with no prior experience necessary," he explains. "As chair for NACLO at Yale I volunteered coordinating and leading practices using NACLO problems, and it was very rewarding because most people in the United States don't encounter linguistics before college, if at all, which means that this is a great opportunity for young people who might not have known about linguistics before to get excited about the languages of the world and how they are scientifically studied."

Evan has studied Chinese in Taiwan. As a part of the Parker Huang Fellowship, which provides international study opportunities to Yale students, he embarked on a yearlong travel experience starting in the fall of 2023 to Cairo, Egypt, to study Arabic; to Almaty, Kazakhstan, to study Russian; and then to Beijing, China, to further his studies in Chinese. "The exciting part about linguistics is that language connects to and permeates every aspect of our lives, meaning linguistics is a very expansive field with both scientific and humanistic elements," Evan observes. "Language is a vehicle by which culture is transmitted from generation to generation. It reflects peoples' history and where they have lived."