Six students receive Critical Language Scholarships

Bryana Shook

These students join approximately 580 competitively selected American students at U.S. colleges and universities who received the award this year.

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The Critical Language Scholarship program provides scholarships to U.S. undergraduate and graduate students to spend eight to 10 weeks overseas studying one of 14 critical languages: Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bangla, Chinese, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Swahili, Turkish or Urdu. The program includes intensive language instruction and structured cultural enrichment experiences designed to promote rapid language gains.

For the five undergraduates and one graduate student, their majors range from anthropology to comparative literature to risk management - an unequivocal statement on the importance of language instruction across disciplines, majors, schools and colleges. The State Department identifies the selected languages above as critical, though in terms of enhanced career success and life fulfillment, expertise in second and third languages brings multiple benefits and exponentially broader opportunities. Congratulations to these students as they travel and learn, explore and discover more through the power of communication.

Image: Bryana Shook, who is studying Chinese in Dalian, China this summer.