Hello! I’m Kat – short for Kateryna, which saved me plenty of anxiety waiting for substitute teachers to massacre pronouncing this “foreign” spelling of an otherwise common name (huge shout out to my high school volleyball team for kicking out those 3 extra syllables). In short, I’d call myself a writer (more so a lover of frantic iPhone scribbles), a travelling fanatic, and a pre-med student who spends many hours in hospitals and labs. I’m currently a sophomore studying biomolecular science with a minor in writing, so sitting in a classroom with under 300 students this semester has brought upon quite a bit of culture shock. It’s been a refreshing change of pace, and has gifted me the creative outlet I wanted alongside my alternate world of frantic note taking (and countless hours of decoding these notes).

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               While I’m a way-too-proud East Coaster from Fair Lawn, New Jersey – 25 minutes from Manhattan, I can’t leave out – I was born in Athens, naturally setting my standards for Mediterranean food through the roof. To further complicate things, my entire family is Russian while from Ukraine, so you can imagine the debates I’ve sat and listened to people have about where I truly am “from.” I’ve learned to dissociate the idea of “home” from places and tack it onto people instead, allowing me to fully enjoy every new location I enter. I’d argue that being from so many different places has in part inspired my love for travelling. My family has long instilled the value of exploring like a local lives, so we’ve gotten creative in how we experience countries firsthand. Many of the pictures to the left capture some of these moments.

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               I’ve noticed I’m absolutely terrible with letting people off easy by answering “how are you?” with just “good.” I think this endless desire to share explicit details about my life and experiences is one of my key driving forces for writing (read my “Why I Write” piece for more details). Being completely honest, I dreaded writing before my senior year of high school, and I didn’t develop a true excitement for it before writing my first narrative piece in English 125. I fell in love with the practice of combining my personality into a mix of anecdote and analysis, and uncovered how to use my writing so that I have a place to grow. Every time I would open up a blank file and scribble my thoughts, insights would creep out and I’d feel comfort in verbally solidifying my opinions and emotions. Much of what is on this site reflects this theme, so I hope these pieces provide a scope on how my mind operates.

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        Warning – it gets messy.