Elise De Los Santos is a second-year student in the Rhetoric, Media, and Publics Ph.D. program. She has a B.S. from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, where she triple-majored in journalism, history, and English literature. She worked in various editing roles at the Chicago Tribune, starting out as a copy editor and rising to executive editor at RedEye before joining the Tribune copy desk, where she edited metro, investigative, politics and breaking news stories. She returned to Medill as a lecturer to teach reporting and newswriting, and now has returned to the classroom as a student in the RMP program. She is studying how language used to describe identities evolves over time, particularly in how news outlets and institutions adopt and use those terms, and the discourse that surrounds those changes.