 One of his teachers was Egils Levits, who was elected President of Latvia in 2019 a few months after Kariņš would become prime minister.From 1984 to 1986 he studied at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, before switching to a linguistics program at the University of Pennsylvania where he graduated "summa cum laude" in 1988.In 1990, he received a grant from the American government to take Russian language classes in Leningrad, and in 1994 he received another government scholarship study to pitch accents and to teach sociolinguistics courses as a guest lecturer at the University of Latvia.