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Evelyn Torsher ’17 has been awarded a U.S. Department of State (CLS) to study Arabic in Amman, Jordan. She also received a CLS in 2015 and studied in Morocco.

The CLS is a program of the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, aimed at offering intensive overseas study in critical need languages. CLS is highly competitive: this year more than 5,700 applications were received for 550 national awards.

Torsher, a world politics concentrator and current participant in the college’s Washington, D.C., program, is interning at the Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute this semester.

“My interest in Arabic stemmed from work I did with refugees in high school and a desire to contribute to peacekeeping efforts in the Middle East,” explained Torsher.

At Â鶹¹ú²úAV, she is a teaching assistant in Arabic and co-authored an entry level Arabic textbook with a faculty member. In September, she presented a project, “Storytelling: A Tool for Arabic Language Acquisition,” at the New York Six Liberal Arts Consortium Undergraduate Research Conference.

Class of 2017 president and an admissions office tour guide, Torsher is also a violinist in the orchestra and writes for the Spectator. She is a Project SHINE tutor in English as a Second Language and spearheaded a local Peace Action New York State chapter on campus. 

The CLS Program is a fully-funded overseas language and cultural immersion program for American undergraduate and graduate students. It is aimed at broadening the base of Americans studying and mastering critical languages and building relationships between the people of the United States and other countries. Participants are expected to continue their language study beyond the scholarship period, and later apply their critical language skills in their future professional careers.

CLS students receive a minimum of 20 hours per week of classroom instruction and participate in extensive community engagement activities.