SENIOR PROFILE: Mariel Frank

Mariel Frank's decision to matriculate at Barnard was an improbable one. After having balled up and tossed out every piece of literature that the admissions department sent her, she was lured-in part-by a program that didn't actually exist. "I thought, 'What the hell? It's on the Common App, and it's in New York City,'" Frank recalled.

One visit to Morningside Heights changed everything. "As soon as I walked on the campus, it felt right to me," she said.

When Frank, a resident of Albany, N.Y., arrived in the fall, she was surprised to find that the linguistics major she'd read about in a brochure was only a clerical error: the program had been discontinued years earlier. That didn't stifle her interest in the study of language, though.

After taking Prof. Paul Kockelman's Introduction to Language and Culture, Frank was inspired to cobble together her own program. She approached professors with linguistics experience from across the University, planned a course of study, and filled out form after form. Finally, she was on her way to a rarity: a Barnard degree in linguistics.

Frank, who knows French, Spanish, Latin, and a touch of German, said that she preferred the arrangement to a school with a linguistics department because it allowed for greater ideological flexibility. "At other schools, it [the program] is usually swayed towards one school or the other in terms of linguistics."

She credited her interest in phonology, morphology, dialectology, and other -ologies to a fascination with "communication in general and the fact that someone can communicate in a non-gestural way." Frank, whose mother and father are from Detroit and Germany, respectively, said: "Part of it is also the fact that my father didn't speak German to me when I was little, and I sort of regret that."

With a newly-formed linguistics concentration at Columbia and a seemingly revived interest in the field on both sides of Broadway, Frank sees the creation of an official major ahead. In the meantime, "I've basically been handing out my proposal to everyone."

After school, Frank will teach English in Japan through the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program. In the future, she hopes to address disparities between theory and practice of teaching English as a second language in American schools.