UCSB Students Receive U.S. State Department Language Scholarships

Graduate student Nicholas Ragheb and undergraduate Nadim Houssain are among 610 scholarship recipients –– selected from a pool of nearly 5,000 applicants –– who will spend the summer at an intensive language institute in a country where their language of study is spoken. Ragheb and Houssain will travel to Morocco and Jordan, respectively, where each will study Arabic.

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

Selected finalists for the 2013 CLS program represent more than 200 institutions of higher education from across the United States and Puerto Rico, 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.clsholarship.org.