A UGA student and a recent graduate have been selected to study the Arabic language while abroad this summer through the U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarship program.
Cassidy Lyon is traveling to Tangier, Morocco, and Alice Naghshineh is studying in Madaba, Jordan. The participants are joining approximately
560 U.S. undergraduate and graduate students who are spending eight to 10 weeks in intensive language institutes across the globe.
Lyon is a 2016 graduate who majored in international affairs in the School of Public and International Affairs and hails from Newnan. This fall she begins her master’s program in Washington, D.C., at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.
Naghshineh is a senior Honors student from Marietta, majoring in Arabic and mathematics in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and economics in the Terry College of Business. Last summer she studied the Persian language in Tajikistan, where she was placed with a local family for two months through the Critical Language Scholarship program. Her experiences earned her a Fulbright grant to return to Tajikistan, where she will perform economic development research this fall.
The Critical Language Scholarship program is part of a U.S. government effort to dramatically expand the number of Americans studying and mastering critical foreign languages, such as Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bangla, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Indonesian, Japanese, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Swahili, Turkish or Urdu.