From Broken Code to Brilliance: My Journey as a Computational Linguist 💻✨

Hi, I'm Natalia Kuznetsova—you could say I'm a friendly computational linguist on a glorious path of passion and a past of pain. 😢 Let me take you back to the beginning...

I was born in a small, small town in Siberia, and let's be honest, it wasn't exactly a glorious chapter. My family barely got by and I grew up in an apartment we couldn't quite afford, sharing a one-bedroom with no heating in those awful -40°C İy winter months. ❄️ But even during those dark days, I had this quirky passion for languages—how they worked, how they connected people. I would cover the frosty windows with scratches of grammar rules (we couldn't afford paper). 📝

Then came the darkest chapter: after my dad left when I was 12, mom worked three jobs to keep food on our table and I felt so completely alone, as if my dreams were melting away. One day, and I honestly don't know how, I found an old, broken computer in the dumpster (yes, literally). I fixed it up, and with the aid of a bunch of pirated programming textbooks (sorry not sorry 😅) taught myself coding, and discovered the world of computational linguistics. I was blown away—algorithms could understand human language?! 🤯

After too many all-nighters, rejection from universities ("You won't make it," they said), and crippling uncertainty... I got a scholarship to study abroad. 🎓 And now look at me turning messy code into poetry one algorithm at a time—and guess what I’m only just getting started. 💪

Life pushed me down, and I rewrote my story. And if I can do it? You can too—as I said—let's geek out over language, tech and the messy art of being human. 🥰✨ #UnderdogStory #GirlNextDoorWhoCodes