I'm Aruzhan, a journalism student at Northwestern University in Qatar, minoring in Media & Politics. I split my time between broadcast reporting and research on media and political communication. My goal is a career in international journalism — reporting from the field, and paying attention to how the tools we use affect who gets the story.

In summer 2025, I worked as a news reporter at Altai TV, a regional branch of Kazakhstan's national broadcaster, in my hometown of Oskemen. I wrote and edited roughly eight on-air segments and interviewed public officials on regional issues, funded by Northwestern's Summer Internship Grant Program.

With a Summer Undergraduate Research Grant from Northwestern University, I conducted a study testing how ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude perform in Kazakh compared to Russian - identical prompts, measured for where quality drops - paired with interviews with Kazakh speakers about the problems they encounter using these tools for everyday information.

I'm currently conducting this research as a Global Undergraduate Fellow at NU-Q's Institute for Advanced Study, running through January 2027. The project looks at how Kazakhstanis use political memes to voice criticism that would be risky to state directly. I've collected and coded a dataset of 70+ memes so far, with the work ongoing. Paper forthcoming.