Rumson Student Wins U.S. State Dept. Scholarship To Visit China

RUMSON, NJ — This spring, two Rumson-Fair Haven Regional High School students were recognized for their distinguished accomplishments in world languages.

Nina Gettings, a student in Rebecca Wang McKenna's Chinese 4 Honors class, received the NSLI-Y merit scholarship. NSLI-Y is a U.S. Department of State program that provides merit-based scholarships for eligible high school students to learn a less commonly taught language in an overseas immersion program. This merit scholarship has an extensive application and rigorous selection process. Fewer than 15% of applicants are selected based on their school academic achievement, teacher recommendation and language proficiency.

Nina first learned about this scholarship in the Chinese 4 Honors class in October and started the application process right away. After two rounds of essay writing, personal interviews and academic assessment, she was awarded this incredible opportunity. As a finalist of the NSLI-Y scholarship, Nina will go to Washington D.C. on June 26 for a two-day orientation and then spend six weeks (all expenses paid by the U.S. Department of State) in Shanghai with a pre-selected host family, attending an immersion language program and participating in other cultural activities.

Emily Grossarth, a student in Christina Gauss' Spanish 4 Honors class, has been awarded The Sociedad Honoraria Hispanica's Bertie Green Junior Travel Prize. She will be traveling with a cohort of 24 students from national SHH chapters to Peru from July 13 to 22. They will visit Lima, Cuzco, The Sacred Valley, Machu Picchu, Lake Titicaca and the Uros Islands.

Emily was awarded this prize after a competitive selection process in which she submitted an essay and video recording in Spanish, academic transcripts, two letters of recommendation and her curriculum vitae. She was inducted into RFH's Laura Esquivel Chapter of the Sociedad Honoraria Hispanica last spring, one of the 3,000 national and international chapters of the organization. The Sociedad is an honor society for high school students who excel in Spanish, and is sponsored by the AATSP, The American Association for Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese.

Congratulations to these outstanding Rutgers-Fair Haven students and world-traveling Bulldogs!