Success Stories

Alexi especially loved her host family experience with NSLI-Y. She participated in the 2015-16 Korean academic year program and wrote several installments on her host family for NSLI-Y Interactive. In 2016, she also participated in the Global Education Conference, an annual week-long virtual conference that brings together educators, students, and innovators from around the world to present on ideas, examples and projects related to international education and global competency. At this conference, Alexi presented on her host family experience, including stories and tips for being a successful host student and a discussion on the value of living with a host family.

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Thanks to a grant from the Rosenblatt Summer Fellowship, Ben was able to implement Gupeng’s Chinese Language and Culture Camp for 15 seventh grade students in Marin City, an underserved community. Ben’s commitment to sharing Chinese language and culture with academically promising students with limited financial resources led him to the Breakthrough Collaborative, where he served as a Chinese language and teaching fellow in 2016. Ben has also served as a student ambassador for the 100K Strong Foundation. In addition to promoting Chinese language learning in his community and beyond, Ben also has a great interest in environmental issues and U.S.-China collaboration on environment.

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The Share Your Story Challenge was designed so alumni could share their study abroad stories to encourage more Americans to take advantage of international exchange opportunities. Cara spent the 2015-16 academic year in Moldova learning Russian, an experience she described as humbling and full of growth. As one of five grand prize winners, Cara, receive an all-expenses paid trip to Washington, DC for exclusive professional development opportunities and events.

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Feeling empowered to put his Arabic skills to use in his hometown of Worcester, MA, Deni started a chapter of Students Together Assisting Refugees (STAR), an organization founded by another NSLI-Y alumnus, at his high school. The South High chapter has hosted talks by refugee assistance organization representatives, performs volunteer work, and does fundraising. Deni also served as an NSLI-Y Alumni Representative, conducting program outreach and coordinating career development activities for fellow alumni. In this role, Deni was selected as one of only four NSLI-Y alumni to share his NSLI-Y experience with U.S. Department of State officials in Washington, DC. Deni currently attends Harvard University, where he continues to study Arabic with a degree in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

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While in high school in Tucker, GA, Elise founded and served as president of the Arabic Culture Club in addition to serving as team leader of the Model Arab League Team and president of the International Club. Elise continued to study Arabic and provided Arabic lessons to kindergarteners at a nearby school. She also gave several presentations about her exchange experience at high schools in the Atlanta area and served as youth committee secretary for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. Elise was a 2016 and 2017 NSLI-Y Alumni Representative and continued on to participate in the 2017-18 academic year program in Rabat, Morocco. Recognizing her commitment, Elise was awarded Dept. of State’s International Exchange Alumna of the Month in January 2017.

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His father was also deployed to Iraq and brought back many stories of his experiences with the Iraqi people. This passion led Jack to participate in the 2016 Persian program in Tajikistan with NSLI-Y. Jack has since received an Army ROTC scholarship and plans to attend Brown, Johns Hopkins or Tufts University, where he will study Middle Eastern Studies. He hopes to serve in the military, after which he aspires to work for the CIA or the State Department.

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Through his NSLI-Y experience, he continued to pursue his passion of Arabic study by studying in Jordan and Lebanon and was awarded a Benjamin A. Gilman Scholarship to study in Morocco. With his interest in foreign affairs, Kevin was awarded the prestigious Pickering Fellowship. Kevin serves as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer, in the political affairs sector.

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She studies Biochemistry and Computer Science and is a Project SEED- Bayer Scholar and a Sandisk Scholar. Since spending the summer of 2016 in Tajikistan with NSLI-Y, Mayesha has already contributed to spreading cultural understanding about Tajikistan here in the U.S. In addition to facilitating an alumni networking event in Washington, she was featured in the first NSLI-Y Virtual Event on Tajikistan discussing her host family experience and Islam in Tajikistan.

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For Shobhit, NSLI-Y was the start of his path to the U.S. Foreign Service. Shobhitis a recipient of a Thomas R. Pickering fellowship, which provides financial support, mentoring, and professional development opportunities to prepare students for the Foreign Service. As a fellow, Shobhit will intern at the State Department in Washington, DC and at a U.S. Embassy abroad. Shobhit believes public service careers have the potential to make a great impact on the world and future generations and hopes more young people, especially NSLI-Y alumni, will consider pursuing this path. Since NSLI-Y, Shobhit has also returned to China as a student and an English teacher. He has studied U.S.-China diplomacy at Oxford University, has served as a NSLI-Y Alumni Representative, and is currently receiving his Master of Arts in Global Affairs from the Princeton Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He joined the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Service in 2020.

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Upon returning from the 2009 NSLI-Y summer program in Shanghai, Annabeth maintained a commitment to learning Chinese along with her other interests. She attended MIT for a degree in Engineering while also taking Chinese classes and receiving the Fung Scholarship to spend a summer teaching STEM classes in China. After working for a PA Consulting Group, she was accepted as a Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University in Beijing. The Schwarzman Scholarship is a prestigious and selective leadership development program founded by American financier Stephen A. Schwarzman. In addition to earning a degree, Schwarzman Scholars develop a life-long professional network and learn about the global role China will play in the future. During her time at Tsinghua, Annabeth was also a Strategy Intern for Siemens in Beijing. Annabeth recently finished her MBA at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. She hopes that her future career will involve international assignments and collaboration, particularly between the U.S. and China.

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His NSLI-Y experiences have since led to interning in Egypt with the American Islamic Congress to work on civil rights, participating in the Critical Language Scholarship in Jordan, receiving a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship to study Arabic in France, and interning in the U.S. Embassy in Tajikistan. He also received a Bachelor’s degree from Macalester University in International Affairs and Arabic and then received the prestigious and selective Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowship to attend American University for a Master’s in International Affairs. Through the Pickering Fellowship, he has entered the U.S. Foreign Service in the Public Diplomacy sector.

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When Julius entered high school, he was surprised to be placed in Chinese class rather than Spanish. He quickly fell in love with the language though and was grateful for this lucky “accident.” It also led to his participation in the 2008 NSLI-Y summer program in Shanghai. Julius says that his time on NSLI-Y was a pivotal experience for him. He then attended Yale University and majored in Political Science and Ethnicity, Race and Migration. He was awarded the Richard U. Light Fellowship, a Yale fellowship for language study in East Asia, to study at Associated Colleges in China, an intensive immersion program at Capitol University of Economics in Beijing. After graduation, he lived in China for two years through the Yale-China Association as a teaching fellow. Julius was then a paralegal at GE, where he had the opportunity to use his language skills on projects that involved legal issues in China. He is currently pursuing a law degree at Harvard University and has interned at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, an international law firm in D.C. Julius plans for his future career in law to have an international dimension, especially involving China.

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In 2016, Noah was awarded a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship at American Research Institute in Turkey for advanced Turkish study at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. In early 2017, he worked as a Turkish Linguist intern at the Institute for the Study of War and later in 2017, he is worked as a Turkish researcher at Kroll Associates, Inc. and as a Hertog War Studies Fellow. Noah graduated from American University's School of International Service with a degree in International Studies and a minor in Communications, where he focused on U.S. Foreign policy, Turkey, and the post-Soviet space. Noah went on to study at the Georgetown University Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he is pursuing a Master’s in Security and Emerging Technology. Along with his studies, Noah is working as a research analyst and Turkish linguist.

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Anna formulated the idea for her research grant while living in Kazan, Russia during her NSLI-Y program, after she learned about her Tatar host parents' experience growing up in the Soviet Union and how their Tatar and Soviet identities mixed. After her freshman year of college, Anna studied Russian at the Derzhavin Institute in Saint Petersburg, Russia and, in the Spring and Summer of 2017, studied in Almaty, Kazakhstan on a Boren Scholarship. During her scholarship, she arranged to take a mechanical engineering elective course in Russian which helped to build her technical vocabulary. Studying Russian in various cities across Russia and Kazakhstan, Anna has been able to learn about post-Soviet culture in-depth.

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Highlighting the impact of NSLI-Y on his internship, Jeremy points out his daily work on the communications team. Every day, Jeremy is tasked to create media clips from Asian American news publications across the country. Jeremy must use his knowledge of Korean and Chinese to read and summarize media clips. Currently in his last year studying Chinese literature and international relations at George Washington University, Jeremy is drafting his senior thesis on the Chinese Diaspora. Jeremy also started the school’s first Asian American Association. The association identifies issues that relate to the Asian American community as a whole, and advocates for community members who do not normally have a voice, or do not know their rights.

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Crystal is proud to provide students with the opportunity and resources to learn a foreign language that is rare in Oklahoma City, let alone the United States. Crystal has consistently remained a shining advocate for underrepresented students studying abroad. She hopes her students will share similar language and cultural immersion experiences to her own. Crystal is currently trying to organize a study abroad trip for her students to Russia.

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Stephanie studied linguistics with a focus on Arabic at the University of Texas- Austin where she conducted research on Arabic-Spanish contact in Latin America through the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program. Her NSLI-Y experiences in Morocco and Oman exposed her to different dialects of Arabic and ways Arabic intersects with other languages. She has also been a language partner for the Arabic Flagship Program and been an assistant for Arabic classes, honing her leadership skills. She hopes to one day become a professor of linguistics and be involved with language education in dual immersion schools.

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