McKeown Awarded CLS Scholarship

Wilkinson’s
very own
Megan McKeown
(a
Peace Studies major
and Women Studies minor) has been awarded a U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) to study critical needs languages this summer.

McKeown is one out of 550 U.S. undergraduate and graduate students who received a scholarship from the CLS Program. She will spend about eight to ten weeks in intensive language institutes this summer in one of 13 countries to study Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bangla, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Indonesian, Japanese, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Turkish, or Urdu.

The Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program is a fully-funded language program of the U.S. Department of State which sends students abroad to study less-commonly taught languages.

The CLS Program is part of a U.S. government effort to expand dramatically the number of Americans studying and mastering critical foreign languages. It provides fully-funded, group-based intensive language instruction and structured cultural enrichment experiences. CLS Program participants are expected to continue their language study beyond the scholarship and apply their critical language skills in their future professional careers.

Selected finalists for the 2014 CLS Program hail from all 50 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia and represent more than 200 institutions of higher education from across the United States, including public and private universities, liberal arts colleges, minority-serving institutions and community colleges. We are very proud that Chapman University is one of the institutions represented in this final cohort.

This year, out of over 5,500 applicants nationwide, CLS selected approximately 550 exceptional undergraduate and graduate students to send abroad.

Congratulations Megan, Wilkinson College is so proud of you!