Anastasia M.-Meisel

Squeezing a 10-symbol target into a 5-symbol string, figuring out an appropriate translation for “None” with minimum context, detecting a missing comma or a typo in a 200-page-long manual – that’s my kind of fun. My love for foreign languages has been there for as long as I can remember. Back in the 90’s I would listen to my dad’s tapes and CDs and wonder what all those songs were about. I was truly curious about their meaning, so we bought my first English to Russian dictionary and I started “deciphering” the lyrics. I listened really hard for any word I could catch, imagined how it would be spelled and searched the book for any similar entry. I would be very proud if I figured out a whole line and would go to my English teacher to check if it made sense. That curiosity never left me. At the age of 10 I already knew that I wanted to study foreign languages, go abroad and do something awesome. So that’s exactly what I did.