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Welcome! My name is Marisa Guerrero, but I mostly go by Mooge. I'm a fourth-year undergraduate student in the East Asian Studies Department at the University of Virginia. My primary and secondary target languages are Japanese and Korean respectively.
I currently work as a Japanese Language Assistant at the Shea House. Shea House is a dorm focused on language learning in an immersion environment cultivated by its leaders and residents. You can read more about it here. My job mostly involves leading Japanese conversation dinners daily a well as planning and leading weekly Japanese cultural activities in a Japanese language immersion setting.
I am also a Distinguished Major, which involves writing a 20+ page thesis about a topic relating to East Asian Studies incorporating primary and secondary sources in the target language (which, in my case, is Japanese). My thesis is about depictions of trauma in translated Okinawan Literature and English-language works about Okinawa. It was nominated for the prestigious Michiko N. Wilson Award, which you can read more about here.
I enjoy coding in my free time (hence the website), particularly reverse engineering retro video games, though I'm still an amateur. I've recently been working on a Python script to decode text in Hamtaro: Ham-Ham Heartbreak for the GameBoy Advance. In the process, I ended up finding unused text for a beta intro-cutscene! You can read more about that here.
Check out my resume and send me an email for inquiries.