Isaak Medrano Receives RISE Scholarship for Paid Summer Research Internship in NLP at University of Marburg (Germany)
Congratulations to Isaak Medrano (BS in Computer Science and Linguistics, Class of 2026) for being awarded a RISE Germany Scholarship to pursue a paid internship at the University of Marburg this summer. He will perform speech corpus analyses on German dialects and standard German using Praat, write programming scripts in R, and participate in speech lab experiments.
The skills that Isaak honed in Professor Carrie Pichan's LING 220, Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology, are instrumental in this award. The research will involve the use of Praat, an acoustic analysis tool, that is taught and practiced in the form of Praat labs and a final course research project on the acoustic features of a language of students' choosing. To learn more about Professor Pichan's teaching and LING 220, see the class spotlight here.
Another important skillset for this internship is R which is a free, open-source tool for statistical analysis, data mining, and data visualization. You gain hands-on experience with R in LING 220 with Professor Pichan as well as in Professor Gyu-Ho Shin's LING 360 Basic Statistics for Language Research and LING 459 Advanced Statistics for Language Research. Check out these courses in the summer and fall 2025 course offerings in linguistics.
Interested in learning more about RISE in Germany scholarships? Read here https://www.daad.de/rise/en/rise-germany/find-an-internship/ and join the mailing list of the UIC Office of External Fellowships! https://oef.uic.edu/