American Councils (ACTR)

The language I was learning when I applied to American Councils Eurasian Regional Language Program (ERLP) was Kazakh, and before that, Russian. While taking Kazakh classes at Stanford, my professor encouraged me to seek out opportunities to study Kazakh in Kazakhstan. One of my friends who recently graduated from Stanford had also been learning Kazakh and recommended that I check out the ERLP for Kazakh language. The reason I sought an international program was because Kazakh is very rarely taught and spoken in the U.S., and there would be no better opportunity to learn it thoroughly than in Kazakhstan!

I was first inspired to go abroad because even as a child, I loved traveling overseas. It offered me the ability to see, touch, and understand things that I may have heard or read about before but was unable to really comprehend and appreciate. Furthermore, I wanted to drastically improve my Russian. Everyone who I talked to about the program highly encouraged me to study abroad in a Russian speaking country. They said that my speaking and listening would get even better after being abroad for a few months.