Claremont, Calif. (April 15, 2015)—Pitzer College students Emma Hanashiro ’15 and Anh Tran ’15 have been awarded US Department of State Critical Language Scholarships (CLS). The CLS Program is a fully-funded summer language and cultural immersion program that aims to expand the number of Americans studying and mastering critical foreign languages.
Emma Hanashiro ’15
Hanashiro, an Asian studies major and Japanese minor, was awarded a Critical Language Scholarship to Japan, where she will spend eight weeks this summer in intensive Japanese language and cultural studies classes at the University of Shiga Prefecture in Hikone. During her college career, she has served as a Japanese-to-English translator for manga publishing and Japanese film distribution companies, worked as a newsroom intern for Anime News Network, and conducted research on Japanese comics, culture and literature.
Anh Tran ’15
Tran, a human biology major, was awarded a Critical Language Scholarship to China. In 2014, she won a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship to study on the Pitzer in China program. Tran also participated in Pitzer’s Costa Rica Summer Health Program. A pre-med student in Pitzer’s joint medical program with Western University of Health Sciences, Tran will start medical school full time at Western University this fall.
CLS Program participants spend seven to 10 weeks abroad studying one of 13 languages: Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bangla, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Indonesian, Japanese, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Turkish or Urdu. The program is sponsored by the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and provides study opportunities to a diverse range of students from across the United States at every level of language learning.
