Nadia Ertz

Nadia is a senior with a major in Slavic Studies, and minors in Political Science and History. This is her 3rd year in Yost, and so obviously this dorm means a LOT to her. She was born in Washington state, raised in San Diego California, but has Northern European and Native Alaskan roots (so naturally she gets sunburnt a lot). Nadia refers to herself as “a Russian Jew who was born neither Russian nor Jewish” as she is very passionate about Russian culture, and is currently in the process of converting to Reform Judaism. Nadia is not her birth name, but it is the Russian translation of her birth name ‘Hope’, and she adopted it as soon as she got into Stanford. Nadia is incredibly eccentric with interests ranging from cooking/baking, to musicals (Broadway, movies, Bollywood, etc), to animals (ask about her cat Boris), to travel, to horror movies and books, to historical research, and so on, and so forth. She tries her best to stand out from the crowd and encourages others to do the same, as she firmly believes everyone is unique, and they should let it be known to the world in the most obnoxious way possible.  

Nadia is happy to hang out with you doing anything from watching and singing along to Shrek the musical (her absolute favourite musical), cooking and/or eating vegetarian food from just about any culture (though Russian cuisine is her favourite), discussing the life of Jews in Stalin’s Russia (her most recent research topic), playing video games (preferably Minecraft), or doing makeup/dress-up (the sparklier and bolder the better). Nadia is trilingual currently, speaking English, Spanish, and Russian fluently, and this year she is going to be taking Yiddish, so hopefully she will finally enter into the unofficial league of polyglots. You can find Nadia on “the sacred couch” (the big grey couch in the dining room) basically whenever she isn’t in class, acting as the president of the Stanford Challah for Charity club on Thursday evenings, or helping Hillel run Shabbat and Farm Fridays on Friday evenings! Nadia is very in touch with emotions, and is happy to be a shoulder to cry on for anyone who needs it, and at the same time, she never passes up an opportunity to make a slightly (or more than slightly) inappropriate joke and spend the next hour laughing about it. She can’t wait to meet you all, and hopes to see you at on-calls, or at one of the many many events that she plans. For more on Nadia, feel free to check out her instagram here, just don’t judge her too harshly for any cringe posts she made in high school.