Elia Gjika

Wellesley College First-Year Writing Supplement

January 8th, 2024

It is difficult to pick only 2 items that pique my interest amidst Wellesley's rich,
eclectic co-curricular scene, conversely, I am certain that my engagement with the
community would revolve around intersectional advocacy, activism, and a desire for
contributing to cutting-edge academic research that advances social wellbeing and
sustainability. My lived experience in Albania has radically shaped these interests and
personal pursuits. As a post-communist country with a feeble legal system and largely
corrupt politics, civic engagement in Albania often takes the character of a requisite for
survival, rather than a philanthropic solidarity act. I recall among my earliest childhood
memories, Sunday afternoons spent in a protest site: my mom, my lawyer aunt, and toddler
brother, unitedly chanting against cultural-heritage destruction or the importing of
hazardous waste in our country. Whether by requesting local politicians to advocate for
waste management reforms through "Zero Waste Challenge", by creating an environmental
phone app that bridges access to eco-conscious consumer alternatives for financially
disadvantaged citizens, or in mentoring emerging women entrepreneurs, I have developed
a penchant for proactive civic engagement pursuits that instill systemic improvement. The
Presidential Scholars Program at Wellesley would upbuild my approach as a
human-oriented problem solver that tackles societal problematics at their roots. With the
support of The Hive and the Human-Computer-Interaction lab, I would cherish the
opportunity to build additional localized branches of the Anderva App and extend its
practice onto Wellesley and other towns in Greater Boston, with the aim of creating
accessible environmentally-friendly-living opportunities for the citizens of Massachusetts.
Secondly, the program of individual study would serve as a perfectly-fitting
opportunity for me to explore a long-pondered research gap through a research project on
Computational Linguistics for the Albanian language. Because Albanian is so unique in its
linguistic structures and attributes, being its own separate branch of Indo-European
languages, and because speakers of this language are not heavily represented in STEM
spaces, the Albanian language is considered by linguistic experts to not be well-integrated
into Artificial-Intelligence-characterized Natural Language Processing models, or
computational linguistics databases. An internship at the DC Center for Applied Linguistics
through Wellesley's support would further allow me to contribute my Albanian-language
knowledge and my people-network to materialize academic contributions that ensure that
Albanian language grammar rules and its evolving vocabulary are more accurately reflected
in computational linguistics corpuses and digital technology tools.