Senior Daniel Castro Bonilla has won a U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarship to study Chinese at the Northeast Normal University in Changchun, China, this summer. Bonilla, an Asian studies major, began to study Chinese in his first year at Bowdoin.
Since 2014, Bonilla is the third Chinese language student at Bowdoin to receive this scholarship.
Every year U.S. Department of State awards the Critical Language Scholarship to about ten percent of the more than 5,500 applicants from over 500 colleges and universities nationwide. The awardees study fourteen foreign languages that the U.S. considers critical to national security: Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bangla, Chinese, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Swahili, Turkish, and Urdu.
“The fact that three Chinese language students have successfully won the Critical Language Scholarship awards four years in a row demonstrates not only the individual outstanding achievements of our students, but also the competitive advantage of our Chinese language program,” according to Bowdoin’s Chinese program.