Anna Pajak is a Lecturer in German. She joined the Germanic and Slavic Studies Department at UCSB in 2020 to teach German language at the introductory and intermediate levels. She is also looking forward to work with the German Club. Anna was born in Poland, where she started studying German in elementary school. As a teenager, she moved to Germany and graduated from a German high school near Berlin (Neuzelle). Since then, she has been visiting her German guest family regularly and she calls Germany her second home. Anna completed her graduate studies in Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She also participated in a post-graduate research year at Humboldt University in Berlin. Her research interests include curriculum design, second language acquisition, communicative teaching methodology, German-Polish relations and German post-war literature. Anna has taught German language at Purdue University Northwest (Coordinator of German program), the University of Chicago (German Lecturer), DANK Haus in Chicago (German American Cultural Center language instructor) and SOFTS (German online instructor). She loves to spend her free time actively with her daughter and son, with whom she speaks Polish and German. Her other interests include traveling, tennis, hiking, cooking, and music.