TESL certificate alum ('16) Jordan Robertson awarded a studentship at Aston University in the UK
I graduated from the program in 2016 with my BA in applied linguistics and a TESOL certificate. I had a great time teaching in South Korea and tutoring many students but ultimately decided to shift my focus to a different area of linguistics.
I am now in my final semester at Hofstra University, where I will be getting my MA in forensic linguistics. I love that I have been able to build on the skills I learned during my time at PSU, and learned how to apply them in completely different ways. The program has been incredibly hands-on both in and out of the classroom, which has been an absolute blast! And it's how I knew this was the right program for me. I have helped build a corpus, worked with lawyers on an ongoing civil rights project, and analyzed data for a major upcoming trademark case.
My master’s thesis is about the use of silence as a tacit admission of guilt. I am focusing on a particular case, Missouri v. Byron Case, in which 16 seconds of silence (and zero physical evidence) was enough for a jury to deem a young man guilty of murder and send him to prison for the rest of his life. To do this, I am comparing the environments of inculpatory silence and silence not brought up as evidence during the trial.
I was recently awarded a full studentship at Aston University in Birmingham, UK to begin working toward a PhD starting this fall! My dissertation will involve analyzing suspect silence during police interrogations and how said silence affects the perception of narrator reliability.
