Critical Language Scholarships

The CLS Program is a fully-funded overseas language program for American undergraduate and graduate students, with the goals of broadening the base of Americans studying and mastering critical languages and building relationships between the people of the United States and other countries.  The thirteen CLS languages are: Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bangla, Chinese, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Turkish, and Urdu. 

Participants in the CLS Program are not required to have any experience studying critical languages for most of the thirteen languages, but Arabic, Chinese, Persian, Russian, and Japanese institutes have language prerequisites.  The CLS Program seeks participants from a wide variety of fields of study, backgrounds and career paths, with the purpose of representing the full diversity of professional, regional, cultural and academic backgrounds in the United States. Thus, students from all academic disciplines, including business, engineering, law, medicine, science, social sciences, arts and humanities are encouraged to apply. 

There is no service requirement for CLS alumni after the program. However, participants are expected to continue their language study beyond the scholarship period, and later apply their critical language skills in their professional careers. Participants are selected based on their commitment to language learning and plans to apply their language skills to their future academic or professional pursuits.  Please note that CLS is an intensive group-based language program. 

The application is now live and available online at:  http://www.clscholarship.org.  Applications will be due November 12, 2014 by 8:00 pm EST.  

Prior to preparing their application, interested students should review the full eligibility and application information on the CLS Program website: http://www.clscholarship.org/information-for/applicants.