National Security Language Initiative for Youth Chinese Summer 2018
OverviewHello! This is Joseph Fisher, and a couple of weeks ago I found out I am a finalist for NSLIY Chinese Summer in Kaohsiung! If you are a future applicant, or just one of my friends or family members who just wants to keep up with what I am doing, this blog is for you! Especially if you are an applicant in the coming years, I found it difficult to find a Chinese summer blog that was easy to navigate and was consistent, so hopefully this will be a great resource for you! What is NSLIY?If you don't know, NSLIY stands for the National Security Language Initiative for Youth. Now to the uninformed, that might just sound like a whole lot of nothing. It basically means that the State Department is trying to protect the language diversity of Americans in future generations. They do this by assigning what they call critical languages (languages they don't want to die out in the youth), getting a lot of funding, and creating this program! They partner with universities and exchange programs in countries with large numbers of these "critical language" speakers to send a group of American high-schoolers over there for a summer or for a full year! Now it is not a walk in the park to apply. The application progress is pretty rigorous and includes a bunch of essays, an interview, and a letter of recommendation. I'll go into the details later, but I was one of the lucky 1 in 6 who got selected. If you do get selected, it is all worth it. The state department pays for everything. Your flights, your room and board, your meals, your metro card, they give you a weekly stipend, and I even heard they are giving us a local phone when we get there! I will be in Taiwan for 7 weeks with this program, studying Mandarin Chinese with 23 other finalists. I am so lucky to have this experience! If you are at all interested, apply!!! You can apply next fall at nsliforyouth.org. Here are the languages and countries where they offer them:
A bit more about my programLike I said, I applied for the Chinese Summer program and got selected as a finalist for Kaohsiung, Taiwan! In particular with the Chinese program, they have MANY locations (Zhuhai, Xi'an, Deyang, Shanghai, Nanjing, Qinhuangdao, the list goes on). They sort you into a location by your approximate language skill. In my case, most of the kids going to Kaohsiung have around two years of experience. You can go into NSLIY with no language experience or fluency, they don't discriminate! Before you start any NSLIY program, every finalist is flown to usually an American university to meet everyone and have a pre-program briefing. NSLIY calls this a PDO or pre-departure orientation. The Kaohsiung PDO will be at Columbia University in New York! Our PDO is from June 18-20, but immediately after that, we will all fly to Taiwan. We will be in Taiwan from June 21-August 5, all together exactly 7 weeks! We were lucky to have one of the longer programs. Our whole group is an experiment, because this is the first year they are introducing a summer program in Taiwan! They have had academic year on the island for many years, but now they are trying a summer program! If you have anymore questions, feel free to comment. It is officially 70 days until PDO, so I will have time to read and answer them :) Thanks for reading!
2 Comments
|