NSLI-Y

I  said I would make a post about both NSLI-Y and YES so I decided to start with my post about NSLI-Y. NSLI-Y stands for National Security Language Initiative for Youth and is sponsored by the US Department of State. It is a full scholarship to study critical languages including Chinese, Arabic, Korean, Hindi, Persian, Russian, and Turkish for either a summer or an academic year. The application for NSLI-Y was available sometime in October and was due November 5, 2013. It consisted of information about me and where I live, what kind of activities I do, pictures of my family and friends with me, several essays about why I wanted to do NSLI-Y and other things like that, a teacher recommendation (thank you Mr. Olson!), a parent recommendation (thank you to my mom!), a transcript, and a few other things. I also had to rank my top 3 languages and I chose Arabic (which would send me to Oman or Morocco), Hindi, and Turkish as my top 3 choices. I had lots of trouble with the application the night before it was due because so many people were on the website that it ran incredibly slow, so I woke up really early the morning of November 5, finished the application, and submitted it, which caused me to have a bit of a panic attack but also made me very happy.
Then the waiting game began and finally on December 11, I received the e-mail saying that I was a semi-finalist. I was incredibly excited and couldn't believe it, but after a few days, it finally sunk in and I got more and more excited as the days passed. I had a friend from my school who had also applied to NSLI-Y who sadly was not chosen as a semi-finalist, but it was incredibly fun to talk with her about our dreams for traveling and to freak out when semi-finalist notifications went out. I later received an invitation to my interview at an AFS volunteer's house here in Albuquerque and immediately began thinking about it and getting nervous for it. It ended up being the morning of a swim meet, so I swam the earliest event I could get into, got changed in the locker room, made the disturbing discovery that there was no outlet in the bathroom so I couldn't dry my hair so I accepted the fact that I was going to have a wet ponytail for my interview, and headed off with my mom. When I arrived at the interview, I filled out a short questionnaire and then had my actual interview. My interviewer was extremely nice and I really felt like she was trying to find the good things about me instead of the bad. It was a great first interview experience and I'm very glad that I had the experience.
After my interview, I waited for more than 3 months before I heard on April 16 that I had not been chosen as a recipient of a NSLI-Y scholarship. I was very upset at the time and cried for a little while, but I got over it and just continued to hope for the YES scholarship. I am very thankful to NSLI-Y for everything they taught me through this experience and congratulations to all the people who were selected as finalists! I'm excited that we will be experiencing other cultures together! Thank you for reading! And since posts with just words are boring, here is a picture from each of my top three NSLI-Y countries!

This is how I have always imagined Morocco and I can't wait for the day when I can go visit and see everything in this amazing country.

Although I know very little about Oman, the idea of any country that speaks Arabic has always intrigued me and I also think it's an absolutely gorgeous country.

I had to go the traditional route for India because the Taj Mahal is just so incredibly beautiful and this picture is so amazing. I hope to visit India sometime very soon.

And here is The Blue Mosque in Turkey which I am definitely going to have to make sure I visit while I am in Turkey.

I hope to visit all of these countries and more in my very near future because each of them has something different for me that I've dreamed of learning about!