Kyle Studnicka Pineda is not your typical freshman. He boasts a comprehensive international background at the ripe age of 19. He now finds himself impassioned by the power of language in his Wisconsin Experience.
“Language learning at Madison affected me at Madison before I even started college,” the first-year student attests.
Studnicka just completed his first year with an intended degree path of Marketing, International Business and Italian. In high school, he took AP Italian and quickly passed out of the classes sending him to Van Hise to take courses at the University level. He’s always been interested in Italian since a young age, but didn’t start his studies until high school.
Italian, however, isn’t the only language Studnicka is learning or knows. His first language is actually Spanish. His mother is Mexican and Studnicka spent a lot of his life in Mexico, but his dad is Czech so he has always had an interest in the world and the languages that connect the people of it.
He can speak Spanish, English, Italian, French and Portuguese. He looks to develop his Portuguese further through coursework next year, but feels he will stick with the Italian major throughout his undergraduate studies. He’s considered other languages and has attempted to study Japanese, Turkish, Arabic, Albanian and “very limited Chinese.”