My name is Margaret Allen, and I was born and raised in Fairfax, Virginia. I obtained my first degree in psychology and decided to pursue nursing career in 1991. I had been a registered nurse for over 20 years working in Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, and Massachusetts. After working in home care in southeast Massachusetts, I moved back to Virginia help care my elderly parents.

About 3 years ago, I also began tutoring adult students that were not native speakers in English. This is something that I enjoyed, maybe because I always had passion for language. I took several language courses in high school including Latin and French and some German while I first went to college. Even as a hobby I enjoyed taking language lessons of Spanish and Japanese and most recently Mandarin Chinese. I often will listen to music and watch films and tv shows in different languages, learning about different cultures. I am not sure where this love of language originated, but my dad was in military and would randomly use French or German in conversations when I was growing up.