Twenty-six students across the nation were awarded the Arabic Study Award to help continue their study of the language. Four of those students came from our very own campus.
PROVO, Utah (August 25, 2015)—“The more I got into it, the more I realized this was something I wanted to pursue with my life.” These words, spoken by Brittany Mueller, just about sum up the feelings of the four BYU students who were awarded the Arabic Study Award by the Qatar Foundation International (QFI) this year.
The QFI has a program – the Arabic Language and Culture Program (ALC) – that helps high school and undergraduates students in their study of the Arabic language. Part of the program’s mission is to “foster strong and genuine connections between cultures.” The award is meant to help the students continue their studies in the language at the pot-secondary or university level. This year, 26 students were awarded and four of them were BYU undergraduates: Brittany Mueller, Chase Adams, Jamie Clegg Hanson and Rachel Lott.
Each of the four students had their own reasoning for what interested them in Arabic in the first place. For Brittany, it was a few friends from Syria followed by taking the 101 class. Jamie Hanson said it was a Middle Eastern politics class. For Chase Adams it was a foreign exchange student that taught him to write the Arabic script. And for Rachel Lott it was when her middle school offered it as a class and she decided to give it a try.
These four students are headed to Jordan this month.
—Amelia Wallace (B.A. English with editing minor ’15)