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Melanie Redeye at Beebe Lake.

Lindsay France/University Photography

Major: Linguistics and German studies
College: Arts and Sciences
Hometown: Akron, N.Y.

I have been living on the Tonawanda reservation in western New York for almost 15 years now. My community is very rural and small, only a couple hundred people. I wanted to go somewhere where I knew I would get a great education that wasn't in an urban setting and that wasn't so big that I would feel like a number. Cornell was the perfect fit.

For six semesters I worked as a language consultant for the International Teaching Assistant Development Program through the Center for Teaching Excellence. As such, I worked with international graduate students to help them improve their English and led discussion groups and acted as a teaching assistant to instructors in the program. I really value this because it was a great opportunity for cultural exchange, and it helped me realize that I am interested in pursuing a career related to language pedagogy.

I am the financial chair of Native American Students at Cornell's (NASAC) Powwow Committee. Each year, we organize a Powwow and Smokedance Competition. This event is a celebration of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) song and dance. I love being able to be a part of the planning of this event and showcasing the culture of the people that originally inhabited this area.

My acceptance into the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program, which gave me the opportunity to pursue my independent research project on nominalizations in Seneca, the language spoken on my and other reservations in western New York. With the support of the program and my advisers, I have been able to conduct interviews with community elders and work closely with grassroots Seneca language projects whose aim is preserving the language. During my research, I became aware of just how threatened Seneca and other Amerindian languages are by extinction. I hope to find innovative and culturally sensitive ways of preserving the language spoken in my and other Native communities.

During my freshman year, I participated in the first FemSex Workshop at Cornell, which was designed to empower, educate and encourage participants to explore and develop a positive relationship with female sexuality. FemSex really helped me define my own female sexuality through the tight-knit and open community that we created.

Without a comprehensive financial aid package I am certain that I would not have been able to come to Cornell.

Walking and running around Cornell and Ithaca, such as around the Plantations and the state parks in the area. The leaves and the air in the fall, the blooming flowers in the spring and even those few sunny days during the winter all made my walk to class and my whole Cornell experience wonderful.

I'm applying to programs to teach English abroad for a year, which I hope will give me a unique non-American perspective on language teaching. After that I'll go to graduate school, hopefully for applied linguistics. In 10 years I hope to be working with my native community as well as with others to encourage the proliferation and existence of languages that are threatened by extinction.