(no subject)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_christine/]

I read over the forum rules, and this is a learning resource. If it's inappropriate, I am sorry.


If you are an American citizen learning Russian, you may be aware that Russian is considered a "critical language" as is Arabic, Turkish, Mandarin, Farsi and some others. As such, the US State Department has a Critical Language Scholarship in which they pay all expenses (ALL of them: plane, fees, room, cultural excursions and they give you a weekly stipend) for undergraduate and graduate students to study in Russia over the summer. They are interested in students who are going to use Russian as part of their future career. With that being said, they do not require any commitment to the state department. If accepted, intermediate students are sent to Astrakhan, Nizhnij Novgorod and advanced students are sent to Tomsk and Samara.

Information here: http://www.clscholarship.org (it's subcontracted through CAORC)

I was at Astrakhan last year, I don't work for the program, but they asked us to get the word out a bit. It's a bit of the state department's best kept secret - they had some incompetent marketers, or so they told my group. It started four years ago because of President Bush's belated realization that we need Arabic speakers, and then they added languages. This is the third year of Russian.

I'm all for telling people about free trips. I did not spend a dime of my own money, and my Russian improved dramatically. The expectation is that while you are there, you speak only Russian, and you live with a host family.

With that being said, because Russian is a CL in the US, it's worth looking for other opportunities tied to it.