A Program of the 
This blog is written by CLS alumna Sidney Tolo Elsayed. Sidney is an alumna of the 2014 CLS Arabic Program and recently participated in the inaugural CLS International Alumni Seminar in Gwangju, South Korea. An educator at heart, storyteller, and a perpetual student, Sidney is always searching for different perspectives and ways to challenge her beliefs and expand her mind. You can read more about Sidney’s adventures on her blog Mido and Tolo.
A rainy afternoon made the perfect bookend to my time in Gwangju, South Korea for the inaugural CLS International Alumni Seminar. My feet had led me to the Asia Cultural Center, where I stumbled upon an exhibition on Arabic calligraphy. A perfect metaphor for our experience – finding connections threaded through sometimes the most unexpected places. There, I found a quiet space in their library to reflect on this week-long program.
It shouldn’t surprise me how a group of 24 strangers can bond so quickly, especially when we have a unique uniting factor – the CLS Program. This intensive summer program accepts language learners studying what the U.S, has deemed ‘critical languages’– those languages essential to U.S. engagement with the world. It fully immerses them into the culture of a country that speaks that language, allowing students to make leaps and bounds in their target language both inside and outside of the classroom.
In this inaugural alumni seminar cohort, the languages represented were Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bahasa Indonesia, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Swahili, Turkish, and Urdu.
As diverse as we were linguistically, the spread of diversity culturally, personally, and professionally was even more so. From Foreign Service Officers, professors, and STEM professionals to home bases on almost every continent, it was interesting to see how everyone connected to the seminar topic. Across disciplines and in various life phases, each bus ride or break time posed an opportunity to gain new perspectives, of which we took full advantage – an unintentional, continuous game of musical chairs.
The topic of the seminar, Media Literacy and Democracy, was both challenging and wide-ranging, and our activities took us deeper into the topic than I thought possible. The city of the seminar, Gwangju, was the epicenter of the South Korean democratic movement, which took place less than 50 years ago. Though its history is as deep and impactful as other movements like Tiananmen Square or the Arab Spring, less is known about Gwangju’s fight for democracy on the global stage.
Prominent professors gave lectures on the topic, from history and terminology to fact-checking practices and media literacy in the digital age. We learned about the city’s volunteer-run magazine, Gwangju News, and Chonnam National University's student-run English newspaper. Just as CLS does, this seminar also got us out of the classroom. We visited the local community radio station, getting airtime of our own as small groups created open-discussion, hour-long segments. Family-style meals with language partners and a traditional tea ceremony made sure we were also immersed in our host country's culture.
As the week went on, common threads continued to weave through our cohort, easily intertwining and creating a tightly knit masterpiece showcasing the strength of the U.S. Department of State’s Exchange Alumni community. Not only were we a group of self-proclaimed language nerds, sharing fun facts and favorite words, similarities across languages, and different ways to continue using our target languages, we also realized that our expertise permeates deeper than just the languages we’ve studied.
While we had organically networked the entire week, on our last day we took time to intentionally network. Each of us had a large paper with three goals, personal or professional. We then shared our main goal with the group, but more importantly, shared our spheres of expertise – what others could come to talk to us about. Meandering the room, we then left post-it notes of advice, encouragement, or connections on each other’s papers.
As I made my way around, I noticed some much bigger commonalities and conversations that could continue well beyond this week-long seminar, in the space that’s already created by Exchange Alumni. This seminar reminded me that we all have strengths, professional or otherwise, to offer our communities. And while at first it might seem daunting to reach out, there’s someone on the other side willing and excited to help. For me, this means sharing things like fresh ideas for children’s activities at an alumna’s library, what a rate card for copywriting looks like, or my mindful morning routine.
And having just moved to a farm in small-town Saudi Arabia, I already know who to reach out to speak about sustainability practices in rural communities. Whether you want to pivot into a new field, learn how to publish your first book or academic article, advice on how to continue your education or talk to someone else about raising multilingual children – the Exchange Alumni community has someone for that and so much more. We are the sum of our parts, and realizing that you don’t have to do it alone is the greatest gift that the CLS Program has given its alumni.