Scholarships available for summer language study at Penn State

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — In an increasingly competitive job market, senior Landion Donovan-Green is doing everything he can to stand out. That includes studying Arabic, which he credits with helping get him into graduate school.

Donovan-Green, who is graduating this spring, was first introduced to Arabic last summer when he received a scholarship to study at the Language Institute at Penn State.

The institute is a full-credit summer language program designed for people seeking to develop proficiency in a foreign language.

Other summer language courses offered by the Language Institute include Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Latin, Turkish, English as a Second Language and — new this year — Catalan and Korean.

Students can apply for STARTALK Arabic Academy scholarships, which cover up to 90 percent of tuition for Arabic 001. STARTALK is a government initiative started in 2006 to increase the number of Americans learning critical languages. There are also scholarships available for studying Chinese, Russian and Turkish.

These types of language skills are in high demand by businesses, government agencies, and non-profit organizations. Donovan-Green, a fifth-year architecture major from Baltimore, is already seeing positive results. He was accepted to the University of Pennsylvania’s Teaching English as a Second Language program for next year.

Donovan-Green said his goal is “to be a voice for cross-cultural learning and understanding.”

The language programs are open to undergraduate and graduate students from Penn State and other institutions, as well anyone else 15 or older interested in building language competency.

More information about the Language Institute and about scholarships is available at http://www.outreach.psu.edu/language-institute.