Two University undergraduates have received U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarships and will be heading overseas this summer to take part in language and cultural immersion programs.
Daria Lynch ’18, ’19 (T5), a history major, will study Turkish in Baku, Azerbaijan. Christian Wooddell ’17, an anthropology major, will study Mandarin Chinese in Xi’an, China.
Lynch is studying abroad in Vienna, Austria, this semester. She has been studying Turkish at the University since it was first offered in Fall 2015. Last semester, she successfully proposed her own interdisciplinary minor in Turkish studies.
Lynch also was selected to receive a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Undergraduate Research Grant to study in Germany. She was to research the history of second-language acquisition by Turkish immigrant women in the 1960s but declined due to the length of her Critical Language Scholarship program.
Wooddell previously studied Chinese in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, for one year prior to enrolling at the University. He studied Swahili in Tanzania on a David L. Boren Scholarship in 2015–16 and also speaks Norwegian.
“I hope to dedicate my career toward immigrant justice and use my Mandarin language skills to communicate with vulnerable immigrant populations here in the United States,” he says.
Lynch and Wooddell bring the total number of participants from the University to 21 since 2006.
