Students Awarded Travel Grants

Eleven undergraduates—nearly four times the number of Harvard winners last year—have received grants to study languages in East Asia and world hotspots.

The students won thousands of dollars from the National Education Security Program (NSEP), which targets “world regions critical to U.S. interests,” and the Freeman-Asia grants, which are available only to students with financial need and aim to increase study of East Asian countries.

Five Harvard students won grants from the NSEP, and six won Freeman-Asia Grants.

Last year, only three students received NSEP grants, and none received funding from the Freeman program.

The students will bring back “enthusiasm for their experiences studying abroad and their awareness of foreign cultures,” said Leslie M. Hill, associate director of the Office of International Programs (OIP), which administers the grants.

“I’m really going for the experience more than the academic study,” said Tiffany Hung ’06, who will be spending two months this summer in China on a Freeman grant.

But Hung, whose cousin Christina Hung ’06 is also traveling to Beijing Normal University this summer on a Freeman grant, said she plans to remain in China next year in a regular study abroad program at Nanjing University.

The Freeman program does not require that students have much experience with the language that they intend to study. Hung, for example, has only been studying Chinese since last year.

Iliana Montauk ’06, one of this year’s NSEP grant winners, will head to Egypt for two months this summer to study the dialect of Arabic spoken in Egypt.

Montauk, who is also a Crimson editor, has studied Arabic for the past four years and has recently focused her attention on the spoken dialects of Arabic, rather than the Modern Standard Arabic that is usually taught in schools including Harvard.

Montauk has already helped revive a Harvard study group in Moroccan Arabic, and she said she has helped lobby Harvard to teach more spoken dialects of Arabic.

In addition to Montauk, the Harvard students with NSEP grants are headed to regions including China, Morocco, Russia and Hong Kong.

“The NSEP is an interesting grant because of the places it asks students to go,” Hill said.

In May of 1994, the Faculty Council voted to make Harvard an institutional participant in the government-funded NSEP, but members said they wanted to be sure that the program was administered primarily as an educational experience, rather than a national security concern. Faculty Council members also suggested that the locations targeted by the NSEP might be unsafe for students.

Montauk said she expected to feel welcome in Egypt.

As part of the package, the NSEP requires students to use the skills they learn while abroad working for any branch of the government for a similar time period.

The service requirement, which may be fulfilled over a subsequent Summer or after college, has helped to attract some Harvard students, including Montauk and Joseph H. Badino ’05, to the program.

Montauk, who said she is unsure what she will do after college but “know[s] Arabic will come in somehow,” said that working for the government for two months after college will help her explore possible careers.

Hill said she hopes that Harvard students’ success in earning NSEP and Freeman grants this year will bring more students into those and other study abroad programs. The OIP has made a recent effort to present study abroad as a viable opportunity to the Harvard undergraduate community, she said.

The OIP is “doing a lot of things right that OCS [the Office of Career Services] has failed to do before,” said Badino, who will study Chinese language and business in Hong Kong next semester.

NSEP grants were also awarded to Waheed A. Gardezi ’07 to study Arabic, Daniel A. Kahn ’06 to study Russian and Cristina M. Valverde ’06 to study Arabic and Moroccan culture.

In addition to Christina and Tiffany Hung, the Freeman-Asia awards were given to Anais A. Borja ’05, Matthew J. Pagano ’06 and Peter S. Ross ’06, all to study Chinese language, and to Rebecca A. Crosbie ’05, to study Japanese.