Three students win State Dept scholarships
Alexander Guevara
Scholarship recipients, all of them from Illinois, are Alexander Guevara of Chicago; Osamah Hasan of Glen Ellyn; and Michelle Lee of Schaumburg.
The competitive award places each student in a fully funded, 10-week language program featuring cultural enrichment experiences.
The scholarships are part of the National Security Language Initiative, a U.S. government interagency effort to increase the number of Americans mastering critical-need languages. Participants are expected to continue their language study beyond the scholarship and apply their language skills in their professional careers.
Guevara, a senior in the UIC Honors College majoring in criminology, law and justice and minoring in international studies, will study at the Noor Majan Training Institute in Ibri, Oman. He will focus on Modern Standard Arabic with supplemental instruction involving the Omani dialect. After graduation, he plans to apply for a position with the Foreign Service or the FBI.
Osamah Hasan
“The identification of my career goals of becoming a medical educator and providing community-based health care around the world served as a catalyst to my continued interest in the country,” said Hasan, a 2010 graduate of Glenbard South High School.
Lee, a UIC Honors College senior majoring in chemistry, will travel to the Fuijan province of China to study Mandarin at Xiamen University in Xiamen. She previously studied Mandarin at UIC and also speaks Cantonese.
She has two years of research experience focused on organic synthesis in the lab of Tom Driver, associate professor of chemistry. After graduation, she plans to return to UIC to pursue a doctor of pharmacy degree.
Michelle Lee
UIC ranks among the nation’s leading research universities and is Chicago’s largest university with 27,500 students, 12,000 faculty and staff, 15 colleges and the state’s major public medical center. A hallmark of the campus is the Great Cities Commitment, through which UIC faculty, students and staff engage with community, corporate, foundation and government partners in hundreds of programs to improve the quality of life in metropolitan areas around the world.
