May 10, 2012

Graduate Students Receive U.S. State Department Language Scholarships

Four UC Santa Barbara graduate students have been awarded U.S. Department of State 2012 Critical Language Scholarships for Intensive Summer Institutes.

Silvia Ferriera, Corinne Kalota, Ayhan Ucok, and Elizabeth Weigler are among 631 graduate and undergraduate scholarship recipients who will spend the summer at an intensive language institute in a country where their language of study is spoken. Ferriera will travel to Morocco to study Arabic; Kalota will travel to Tajikistan to study Persian; Ucok will travel to Turkey to study Turkish; and Weigler will travel to India to study Punjabi.

The State Department's Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) program is part of a U.S. government effort to increase opportunities for American students to study critical-need languages overseas. It is part of a wider effort of the U.S. government to expand the number of Americans studying and mastering thee languages. The program is administered by the Council of American Overseas Research and the American Councils for International Education.

Selected finalists for the 2012 CLS program represent 239 institutions of higher education from across the United States, including public and private universities, liberal arts colleges, minority-serving institutions, and community colleges.

Students in the CLS program are among more than 40,000 academic and professional exchange program participants supported annually by the State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, which serves to promote mutual understanding and respect between people of the U.S. and those of other countries.

More information about the program is available at http://www.clscholarship.org.

About UC Santa Barbara

The University of California, Santa Barbara is a leading research institution that also provides a comprehensive liberal arts learning experience. Our academic community of faculty, students, and staff is characterized by a culture of interdisciplinary collaboration that is responsive to the needs of our multicultural and global society. All of this takes place within a living and learning environment like no other, as we draw inspiration from the beauty and resources of our extraordinary location at the edge of the Pacific Ocean.