Dora Hinderer

Joint MA in Intercultural German Studies
Dora Hinderer headshot

Where and what did you study before you came to Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Waterloo?

Before starting the IcGS-program, I was doing my Bachelor of Education at the University of Mannheim.

What are your interests in German Studies?

I have always been most interested in Linguistics but more recently, I am focusing more on Computational Linguistics. This year, however, I have a class in Sociolinguistics which is also really fascinating!

Why did you choose the University of Waterloo?

The IcGS-program is an exchange program between the Uni Mannheim and the UW. Therefore, I did not specifically choose the University of Waterloo. I did, however, choose the IcGS-program for a reason and one of them is that I always wanted to go to Canada. Spending a whole year here is much more than what I have dreamed of and the UW is a great university to study at!

Do you already know what you want to write your thesis on?

I don’t have a specific topic yet, but I’d love to write something about how corpora can be used to optimize natural language processing and machine translation.

As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

For the most time of my childhood, I wanted to become a news presenter at the Tagesschau because I once participated in a play where I had this role. Other options were singer and actress.

What is a fun fact about you?

Although I’ve been in Canada for almost a year now, I never had a double-double (and probably won’t before I leave :-).