Rochester Review
July–August 2010
Vol. 72, No. 6
Story as a PDF
Departments
Features
Chase Hermsen
Bayville, N.J.Majors: Computer Science, Japanese, and Linguistics
(Photo: Adam Fenster)
You could say that Chase Hermsen and computers are old friends.
“My dad worked for Apple, and I learned to program before my age was in the double digits,” he says. “It was a natural for me” to opt for a major in computer science.
His interest in languages, in contrast, was something he stumbled upon as a high school student at a Japanese language immersion camp in Minnesota.
At Rochester, he encountered the more systematic study of language that is linguistics, and ultimately Hermsen found himself with a triple major.
His curiosity fueled his course selection. “I didn’t take more classes than I was going to anyway. This way, I was applying every class to a major.”
His three areas of study brought illuminating convergences: one semester, three of his courses were examining the concept of the sentence diagram—breaking down the sentence to analyze how it conveys meaning—each from its own particular perspective. The exploration of a concept through the lens of three fields simultaneously gave him greater insight into the assumptions and goals of each one, he says.
Now Hermsen, who also earned a certificate in literary translation in the College’s new literary translation program, is poised to enter the field of computational linguistics—a field that’s involved “anytime languages meet computers.” (He cites automated telephone customer support as one familiar example.) “It ties two of my majors together.” He’ll enter a master’s program at the University of Washington this fall.
His years at Rochester were rich ones, Hermsen says. Despite the rigors of completing three majors, “I’m not a workaholic.”
At Washington, he plans to find time for some of the leisure activities he enjoyed on the River Campus: hanging out with friends, juggling, and practicing “the hobby of finding new hobbies.”
