Susan Grunewald ’11 received her doctoral degree in History at Carnegie Mellon University in 2019. She majored in Russian and East European Studies and minored in German at Lafayette, but she took numerous history courses and wrote an honor’s thesis under the direction of Joshua Sanborn. She spent a year as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in the Applied Linguistics Department of the Ulyanovsk State Technical University in Russia after graduating from Lafayette, where she developed a passion for teaching and decided to pursue a doctorate in Soviet History. Her dissertation has been funded by a Cohen-Tucker Dissertation Research Fellowship through the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, two A.W. Mellon Fellowships in Digital Humanities, and the Central European History Society. Her success in graduate school would not have been possible without Lafayette’s rigorous coursework. Susan’s penchant for breaking boards over her head while a member of the Lafayette Taekwondo Club did not seem to do any permanent damage, and she can still be found practicing the martial art in her spare time at Carnegie Mellon.