I am Hyung-Jo Yoon, a Ph.D. candidate in Second Language Studies. While pursuing my B.A (in English Education) and M.Ed. (in TESOL) degrees, I taught a variety of groups of language learners, including secondary-school EFL learners, adult immigrants, and Korean as a foreign language learners. These valuable experiences, together with my belief in the importance of a good education for successful learning, made me reflect deeply on what I can do as a researcher for more effective pedagogy and assessment. Luckily, from the onset of my Ph.D. studies, I had further teaching experiences at the university level, and this naturally led me to shape my specific research interests. Particularly, I taught an intensive writing course in my first year and found my students having different levels of difficulty across writing tasks, guiding me to investigate the issue of students’ writing development in different genres. I am now working on several projects related to varying linguistic features and their functions across different writing tasks with my advisor, Dr. Charlene Polio. Other research areas I found very interesting involve computational text analysis and corpus linguistics. Inspired by how empirical evidence from authentic language data can further advance our understanding, I have wanted to contribute to such research areas. Specifically, I found that while many aspects of writing, such as linguistic complexity and coherence, have been explored from an automated approach, interactional metadiscourse, or authorial voice, has rarely been discussed with regard to its possibility for automated analysis despite increasing interest in its role in writing assessment. My solution for this gap was to develop my own automated processing tool, the Authorial Voice Analyzer, and I am currently in the process of making this computational tool available to researchers interested in this area. This semester (Fall 2016), I am beginning the final phase of my Ph.D. journey (dissertation data collection and writing), and I can’t predict what challenges are awaiting me, but one thing I know for sure is that I am quite excited about this part of my life.