Jackson School graduate students Nick Persons, Ruben Valencia, and Rachel Cook were awarded the State Department’s Critical Language Scholarships (CLS) for intensive language study abroad this summer.
The CLS Program is part of the U.S. government’s efforts to expand the number of American students studying critical foreign languages. “Critical” foreign languages include languages spoken primarily in the Middle East, East Asia and Eastern Europe.
The students will spend about two months staying with host families or other foreign students, taking intensive language classes and practicing speaking with a native speaker outside of classes.
Seasoned traveler Nick Persons has already had to adjust his travel plans: the second-year graduate student planned to study advanced Arabic in Cairo, Egypt, for the summer. However, he received notice in April notifying him that CLS would be closing their institutes due to security considerations in Egypt. Persons will instead be sent to Jordan for the summer.
Despite this curveball, Persons is excited about going to Jordan. He has studied abroad in both Egypt and Jordan, and although he spent more time in Egypt and is most familiar with the Egyptian dialect of Arabic, he considers transferring to Jordan a pleasant surprise.
“There are definitely some benefits about going to Jordan,” he explained. “Linguistically, I think my ability in the Jordanian dialect is weaker than my Egyptian dialect, so it’ll give me an opportunity to bolster a weakness of mine. … Probably the biggest positive about Jordan in comparison with Egypt is they house students with home stays rather than with other foreign students. And for me, that’s a really big deal. I think that…as a study abroad student, that’s where you make linguistic progress: living with host families [and] interacting with other students.”
Persons has been studying Arabic and the Middle East since early 2010. His interest in Arabic and the Middle Eastern culture stemmed from a world religions class he took during his undergraduate years. His curiosity was piqued as to how Islam was so entangled in foreign affairs.
To go any further with that interest, he realized he needed to learn the language. “You need language to understand the region,” he explained.
With his understanding of both the language and the region, Persons hopes to get a job with the federal government, an NGO, or a Think Tank. He credits the Jackson School with instilling a broad foundation in contemporary Middle East affairs through historical, anthropological, and political classes, and will apply that foundation when he goes abroad to Jordan.
Second-year graduate student Ruben Valencia will be taking a different path than Persons, traveling to Tajikistan to study Persian. Valencia, a New York native, first became interested in the Middle East because of 9/11. He saw what was on the news and media and “[I] knew it was more complex than that, so I wanted to get a more in-depth understanding [of the culture],” he explained.
Valencia studied Persian for more than a year, attending an immersion program at the University of Wisconsin. Valencia described the program as a good learning experience, but difficult to abide by. At the program, students could only speak in English a couple days a week; otherwise, they needed to speak in Persian. “It was hard,” said Valencia, “like when it’s 8 in the morning… your brain doesn’t work like that!”
That interest in the Middle East lead him from the East Coast to the Jackson School, which he picked because he enjoyed its flexible curriculum and he was able to focus on his specific interest of borders in the Middle East, primarily between Afghanistan and central Asia.
At the Jackson School, Valencia credits professors Scott Radnitz and Joel Walker for pushing him in his classes and assignments to be more specific, provide more details and be more analytical. “They forced me to be very specific, critical, and analytical in my studies,” Valencia explained. “They wanted me to develop my own assessment.”
He hopes to use his combined knowledge from the Jackson School and his trip to Tajikistan to work as a language analyst for the department of Defense, or utilizing his language skills in other agencies.
