Macy Acuña-Taylor is a fourth-year student at the University of Texas at Austin, double majoring in Linguistics and Chinese Language and Culture studies. She began her experience studying Mandarin at an all-girls middle school in Fort Worth, Texas. In addition to her work at IUCJ, she will be participating in a linguistics research project studying language acquisition in adults, particularly the challenge of speech processing, while also preparing to study Chinese linguistic multiplicity in Taiwan. She looks forward to collaborating with and learning from her peers at IUCJ to raise awareness on what shapes U.S.-China relations today.