I am Stephanie Mostert, currently a lecturer in the subject group Academic Literacy. Working with first year students on a daily basis has laid a solid foundation for my research interests. It has fostered within me a curiosity, a desire to know more about what makes first years tick when it comes to their writing in a formal, academic setting. To discover more about this, I have enrolled for a MA degree in English, in which I will make use of corpus-based analyses in order to determine frequencies of nominalisation across written genres of first year student essays. I hope to complete this degree by the end of 2015 to then pursue further studies that focus on aspects of student writing.