Hi. My name is Magdalena Styś and here are a few cool things about me:
Hi. My name is Magdalena Styś and here are a few cool things about me:
I primarily write non-fiction and poetry. My work has appeared in Also Cool Magazine, the Amazine, and elsewhere; you can take a look at my portfolio in the writing tab. I was nominated to appear in the 2025 Best of the Net Anthology.
I've interned at ONLY POEMS as a Website Assistant and am currently serving as an Editor for Disobedient Magazine and a Poetry Editor for Moonday Mag. I recently joined The Amsterdammer as a Hard News Reporter. As for my own literary tastes: I love stuff that makes me feel good and stuff that makes me feel bad.
I love language and everything it does - how it affects the ways we write, talk, think and vote. I'm obsessed with semantics and philosophy of language and I have a three-dimensional system I use to decide whether I like a particular word.
I'm currently in the Honours BA Linguistics programme at the University of Amsterdam. (I'm also minoring in European Law, but that's relatively unrelated). My dream is working in academia and conducting socially conscious critical linguistics research.
Over the past few years, I've garnered a variety of more-or-less useful skills. I can manage websites, do graphic design for online and print, write promotional copy and JavaScript, organize events and bake a pretty good carrot cake. I feel the happiest and proudest of myself when I can use any of these skills for good.
Since June 2025, I've been chairing Spotlight, the queer student association at UvA. As chair, I acquire and manage our partnerships and grant applications, organize events, create social media posts and write more emails than I would like to. Throughout this tenure, my goal is to balance building a welcoming queer community on campus with facilitating advocacy and real-life change in the livelihoods of our queer students: our GenderSwap campaign focuses on providing students with affordable gender-affirming products, while ENGAGE! (which I'm proud to call my original project) aims to help students get involved in queer activism. In an attempt to maximize our impact, we've collaborated with numerous associations, university bodies and cultural centers, including the UvA Diversity Offices and VOX-POP.
For multiple years, I served in a variety of roles at Wave Learning Festival, an American 501(c)(3) student-led nonprofit aiming to provide free and accessible education for underprivileged students. Volunteering at Wave LF was a true bootcamp in jack-of-all-trade-ing: I wrote blog articles about study techniques, created social media content, taught courses on Internet anthropology and world poetry, trained volunteers, contacted schools worldwide to spread the word about our services and hopped on Zoom calls at 5am CET with potential partner organizations. Moreover, it showed me that I'm actually pretty good at getting the job done.
Some of my other work includes coordinating human rights-related events with AISA and teaching English to immigrants and refugees at Right2Education. I would love to work on any project committed to social justice, particularly those related to accessible education, queer rights and immigrant & refugee rights.
Want to work together? Email me at magdalenastys@proton.me.