About Me.
My name's Reetam Bhattacharya, and I attend Interlake High School as part of the Advanced Learning (Gifted) and IB Diploma programs. I'm the Youth Chair of Pratham in Seattle, blogger on Medium, a programmer of games and tools, and aspiring linguist. In the future, I'd love to go into academia and pursue a Ph.D. in linguistics as a professor. My dream schools are Oxford and Harvard University, and I'm working hard to get there!
Why Linguistics?
Linguistics may be a niche field, but it is one that is incredibly valuable - to every day life, to other fields, and to me personally.
01
Language is Everywhere
Language is the way we communicate with each other, and in the media-dominated world of today. But connotations and bias, inescapable facts of language, are powerful, and it affects the way we think about and see issues. Linguistics makes us aware of this and know how it helps and hurts us.
02
Language is Education
The vast majority of education and its resources require literacy and numeracy skills—and those without them end up falling behind. Language experts and linguists play an essential role in teaching literacy, English, and even integrating with technology to bring opportunity to those who need it most.
03
Language is Identity
Our cultures, traditions, and identities as people and as groups are vested in part in our language. It's vitally important to keep languages alive, because that saves the unique perspectives they encode. By protecting language, people are better able to express themselves and their culture.