TAIPEI, Taiwan -- National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) recently celebrated the end of the Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program and the achievements of its students at a closing ceremony in Tainan, according to a press release from the school.
Mike Calistro (CLS 2014 Indonesian) used his Alumni Development Fund to pay for Indonesian language training in a private course entitled Indonesian Maintenance Program (IMP) for himself as well as five other US Army Indonesian linguists stationed in Hawaii. The course focused on reading, analyzing, and translating Indonesian news articles covering political, social, and military issues, thereby i...
Alyssa Mathias (CLS 2014 Turkish) is a Ph.D student in ethnomusicology and served as the head of the UCLA Turkish Music Group for the 2014-2015 academic year. She used her Alumni Development Fund to host two cultural workshops at UCLA. The first was a dance workshop with instruction from a Turkish dancer and ethnographer who has a background in a variety of styles from across Turkey. 10 students p...
Alumni ambassador Hailey Dickson has earned a prestigious scholarship through the National Security Education Program, funding a semester of Hindi language study in India, which she hopes will lead to opportunities to make a global impact in public health.
Nicholas Mickinski, Sidney Tolo, Julianna Renzi, Jane McDermott, and Samee Sulaiman (CLS 2014 Arabic) met while studying in Tangier on CLS together. After returning, they decided they wanted to use their knowledge of Arabic and passion for language learning and cultural exchange. They realized the ideal way of doing this would be to organize a pen-pal program connecting American high school studen...
Yasin Khan (CLS 2014 Urdu), a CLS 2014 Urdu Alumni, worked as a Violence Prevention Educator before entering graduate school to obtain a Master’s in Public Health. Through her work, Yasin learned that gender based violence is the leading cause of injury to women in America and around the world; and that women in immigrant communities are particularly vulnerable to abuse due to cultural and linguis...
Madrid-Ortega is currently in China on a Critical Language Scholarship Program, and feels grateful to receive $8,000 from Gilman to continue studying in China.
Omega Tennant (CLS 2014 Chinese), started the Chinese Studies Program in Nashville, TN at MLK Magnet School in 2013, with the goal of extending language learning services and promoting in-depth understanding of the culture behind Mandarin Chinese to students from marginalized backgrounds. Omega used an Alumni Development Fund (ADF) to purchase more materials for the initiative, which she expanded ...
Kirstin Johnson (CLS 2015 and 2014 Korean) returned from Korea concerned about how to progress with her language learning. Her university offers neither courses in Korean nor any study abroad opportunities in Korea. She realized that teaching what she knew would be a great way of working on her Korean as it would help motivate her in her independent study and help retain information through freque...
Erin McGrath, a 1995 graduate of Lincoln High School, has joined the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland as a National Science Foundation post-doctoral research associate through 2017.
