Here I am.

Hi everybody, I'm Karen.

I'm originally from Anchorage, Alaska, and this is my fourth year at MSU. My number one passion is snowboarding. I am double majoring in English and Spanish Teaching with a Writing minor. Last summer/fall I lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for almost 6 months; I lived with a host family and took classes in Spanish at a university there through MSU's Study Abroad program. I decided I am never living in a city of 17 million people again (even Anchorage is too big for me, and that's only about 300,000 people). But, it was awesome and now I can speak Spanish pretty fluently.

After living in humid, hot Buenos Aires for a while, I was itching to get back to the mountains, so I decided to work at Big Sky as a lift operator last winter. It was pretty cool, because the semester in Argentina ended November 4, and I started work November 15, so I had basically the first two months of the snowboarding season to be on the mountain every single day. Through some lucky scheduling, I was able to live in Big Sky, work 4 days a week, and commute to Bozeman on Tuesdays and Thursdays for 15 credits of classes during the spring semester. It was pretty intense, pretty fun, and I'm never doing that again.

So, I decided to not work at all this summer, thinking I'd saved up a lot of money, and I traveled home to Alaska and back with many adventures in between. Now, I'm broke and I'm taking 21 credits, and trying to get a job on top of that. I'm writing for the Culture section of the Exponent this year, and I'm a peer leader in US101, both of which I'm super excited about—I'm getting real world writing and teaching experience, what could be better?

Other essential information about me: I have a pass to Moonlight Basin this year. Headwaters, yeah!!!