Dear Colleague,

I hope this message finds you well as we enter the final month of 2022! I am writing today to invite you to consider serving as an evaluator for the U.S. Department of State’s 2023 Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Spark. CLS Spark is a virtual initiative that expands access to beginning-level language learning for students who may not otherwise qualify for our overseas programming through courses at their home institution.

Each year, the CLS Program relies on the expertise of advisors, faculty members, and administrators from colleges, universities, and educational organizations around the country to help us select a bright and unique group of scholarship recipients to serve as citizen ambassadors as they spend the summer participating in intensive language study.

This season, the application deadline for the overseas CLS Program and CLS Spark Virtual Initiatives took place on the same date, but their selection processes are staggered slightly. While the selection process for the overseas CLS Program is already well underway, we will not begin reviewing applications for CLS Spark until the new year. 

If you are interested in the opportunity to review for CLS Spark, please complete the form linked below by December 23, 2022. More information about the reading process and our timeline is provided in this form. Please click through to read more, and then be in touch if you have further questions.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/RWMD8MS

For those who have read for and evaluated CLS in the past, please note that this will be a volunteer activity; evaluators will not receive an honorarium. The CLS Program is grateful for our community of dedicated evaluators. We fully acknowledge that we could not facilitate this program without this community. As a small thanks for your contribution to this process, we will provide a letter outlining the importance of this service. We encourage you to use this letter in a promotion and tenure file, or any portfolio or dossier for professional or academic advancement.

Please let me know if you have any questions about evaluating applications or about this survey. I look forward to hearing from you!

Sincerely,

Caitlin Ting
Assistant Manager, Outreach & Selection
clsadvisors@americancouncils.org