Love has never been a popular movement, and no one's ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and passion of a very few people.

I'm a writer.

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'm on staff for The Amsterdammer and Inter, and will begin my tenure as an international columnist for Folia in September. As for my own literary tastes: I love stuff that makes me feel good and stuff that makes me feel bad.

I'm a linguistics student.

I love language and everything it does, how it affects the ways we write, talk, think and vote. I'm casually obsessed with philosophy of language and sociolinguistics and I have a three-level system I use to rank how much I like a word.

I'm currently working towards my BA in Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. I believe a good academic is one that is able to build connections with ideas beyond their field (and I have a thousand interests I'm still yet to explore), so I'm also minoring in European Law and Global Migration and have taken electives in fields from philosophy to education policy and open source investigative methods. My dream is working in academia and conducting socially conscious critical linguistics research. My current interests lie at the intersection of language and politics, primarily in migration contexts.

I want to make the world a better place.

I've grown to be a person that acquires skills quickly: 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.

From June 2025 to June 2026, I chaired Spotlight, the queer international student association at the UvA. As chair, I acquired and managed our partnerships and grant applications, organized events, created social media posts and wrote more emails than any sane person would have liked to. During my tenure, my goal was combining community-building efforts 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, and we were committed to raising awareness of intersectional aspects of queerness in our queer history campaigns and events. 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.

At the moment, I'm keeping myself busy in my role as PR Coordinator at De Nieuwe Mensa and campaigning for Plant Based Universities and the ASVA Student Union. I would love to work on any project oriented towards social or environmental justice.

Want to work together? Contact me at magdalenastys@proton.me.