Community News

Evan Sing, who graduated from Chelsea High School in 2022, is currently participating in the U.S. Department of State’s Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program studying Russian in Tbilisi, the capital of the Republic of Georgia.

He is one of approximately 500 American students at U.S. colleges and universities who were selected from over 5,000 applicants to study different critical languages around the world in the summer of 2024.  The CLS Program is part of a U.S. government effort to increase the number of Americans studying critical foreign languages. In addition to Russian language courses, students like Evan also receive an introduction to the Georgian language which helps them to navigate the city and communicate with members of their host community.

Georgia, a former Soviet territory, is located between the Black Sea and Caucasus mountains.  It is bordered on the south by Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Distinct indigenous cultures and languages have developed in Georgia for thousands of years, but Russian is commonly spoken to communicate between groups and among the country’s growing community of Russian émigrés.

Since graduating from CHS in 2022, Evan has been studying at Stanford University, pursuing a major in international relations and a minor in Russian.  His love of language started in high school: “I studied French for four years in high school. I became especially committed during the pandemic when I spent a lot of my free time learning new vocabulary and improving my listening skills through YouTube videos and other online resources. This experience, combined with instruction and encouragement from great teachers at CHS, really solidified my passion for language learning.”

While Evan is proficient in French and Spanish, he has found Russian a little more difficult: “When I started college, I knew I wanted to continue learning languages and chose Russian because of its importance in culture, literature, and politics. Russian has proven to be much more difficult to learn than languages I’ve studied before, but support from the Critical Language Scholarship and my teachers at Stanford has already helped me make great progress.”

Evan also emphasized the importance of language learning: “Developing the ability to understand and connect with people, as well as cultures and ideas different from my own has been an immensely gratifying experience. Anyone can learn a language with enough time and effort, and I hope that K-12 schools will continue to provide students with the same high-quality language instruction that empowered me to pursue a degree and career in connection with the peoples and places of the world.”

When Evan returns from Georgia he will be spending the fall trimester abroad at Stanford’s Paris campus.  After college, he hopes to capitalize on his passion for languages by working for an NGO, firm, or government agency with an international lens.