Sentinel Source
Date: August 17, 2015
By: Matt Nanci Sentinel Staff
For many students, this part of summer is spent going back-to-school shopping and
A Taiwanese flag behind her, Keene High School student Beatrice Hoffman will travel to Taiwan at the end of the month to study there until May or June. Michael Moore / Sentinel Staff
preparing for the inevitable reality that the first day of school is near.
But Keene New Hampshire’s (USA) Beatrice R. Hoffman is not a typical high school student.
She’s not getting ready to go back to Keene High School for her senior year. The 17-year-old put graduation on hold to travel more than 7,700 miles to where she’s going to spend the next nine months.
Beatrice is one of 620 students across the country who received a highly competitive National Security Language Initiative for Youth scholarship. The program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and seeks to increase the number of Americans who can engage with native speakers of languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Persian, Russian and Turkish.
She is going to Taiwan to study Chinese at the end of the month. She will live with a host family and go to school in Kaohsiung at the Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages. [FULL STORY]
