📃 My work life
I am an undergraduate instructor and Ph.D. student in Second Language Acquisition in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures at Michigan State University, where I’m working on my dissertation, which examines the correction processes in the acquisition of Spanish as a foreign language.
My background is in applied linguistics / computational linguistics. I had the privilege to study applied linguistics in the top programs in my field, both in Venezuela, my home country, as well as in the US – for my masters at NAU through Fulbright, and now for my Ph.D. at MSU. I used to be distant to, and intimidated by, coding, mainly because I never thought it had any relevance to what I was doing in my field. But thanks to a couple of key moments in my career, and some really inspiring colleagues/instructors, I am now fully in love with all things programming.
In addition to my dissertation, my focus has been on using my Ph.D. time for leveraging my programming/research skills. After I discovered GNU Emacs – and Vim motions, 🤫 – I am always looking for new ways to make my workflow faster and more efficient. So I primarily spend my time working on my config, of course.
🤘🏾 My real life
Fluffy lounging.
I started playing drums in 2003. Back then, I was playing along to songs from the bands of my era (Audioslave, Linkin Park, System of a Down, etc.). But then, I had to go heavier, right? I went quickly from Metallica, Slipknot, and Slayer, to the real extreme ones – I’m talking Krisiun, Bathory, Vader, Nile… Every year I had to live, breathe, and play faster. Then, as my playing (and hopefully my mindset) became more mature, I delved into more technical, more musically involved stuff: I discovered bands like Death, Cynic, and Meshuggah. I did flirt with jazz for a while, I even played in a big band for about a year. I learned a lot, but eventually I acknowledged that metal was my true love.
For the past two years (after a lot of Ph.D. trauma), I’ve started to be intentional about going to the concerts of the bands I love. Watching Cynic for the first time was something else; it’s not just their flawless playing, but also Paul Masvidal transpires so much peace, and Cynic is not a crazy famous band, so it felt like a very special, intimate concert. By comparison, Ulver (already very niche band) had 132,314 monthly listeners as of Jan 20 2025, whereas Cynic had only 38,598 monthly listeners.
Paul from Cynic.
I’ve already checked off some of the bands I had in my to-do list, like Nile, Meshuggah, Cynic, Depeche Mode. The next thing in my list is to dive into the pit and hopefully stage dive, although I have to be careful at my age 👴🏾. Update: I did it already – I fell down in the middle of the pit cause I basically have no weight at all. I didn’t break any limbs though lol.
Feel free to reach out! Here’s my resume and my socials below.
