Travis Frederick is a Senior in Security & Intelligence. He was awarded a Summer Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship to study Russian language in St. Petersburg. Here is his FLAS application essay.
"It is my intention to study at the Summer Intensive Language Program at the University of Pittsburgh during the summer semester 2014. At the beginning of the program I anticipate having completed the equivalent of three years of Russian language study. I will be able to achieve this level of pro fi ciency by taking a nine (9) credit hour intensive language course overseas at Saint Petersburg State Polytechnic University this spring 2014.
Along with the language course I will be taking 19th Century Russian Literature, Political Science, and Russian History. By the end of the summer program I will have completed the fourth year of Russian study and be ready to take some of the most advanced Russian courses offered at Ohio State the following autumn. These courses are directly related to my course of study as well as my
intended career path. The language requirements for my International Studies major and Russian minor will be completed by the end of the spring program abroad. However, it is not my intention to stop there. I plan on pursuing true fluency in the language so I can be fully prepared to work with the language and work in Russia in the future. After completing the Summer Intensive Language Program I will have one more semester of undergraduate studies at Ohio State. Then I will be applying to pursue a Master’s followed by a Ph.D. Currently, my programs of interest include the Master’s in Slavic and Eastern European Studies at Ohio State, Pittsburgh’s Master’s in Security Studies and Ph.D. in Slavic and Eastern European Studies, and Georgetown’s Master’s in Security Studies. Working with the programs at Ohio State and Pittsburgh would give me the necessary experience to achieve a higher level of competitiveness for the programs I have listed. Russian fluency is crucial to my future career. I hope to work for the Department of Defense as an intelligence analyst. In order to not only be competitive for a job in the field, but to be able to do the job well, it is important to be a subject matter expert in your field. Ideally, I would be tasked with analyzing intelligence coming from collectors in Russia. In order to spot trends and potentially important information in these collections the analyst needs to be able to understand the language, the culture, and be able to analyze writings deeper than the surface level. It is for these reasons that it is crucial to have as deep an understanding of the Russian language and culture as possible. The intensive summer program would be a total immersion in language coming on the heels of a semester in Saint Petersburg. It would serve as a stepping stone for graduate school and a career, but more importantly as an extremely influential step in achieving fluency and high-level working knowledge of the language.
I hope that with experience abroad, I will be ready to take the next step to ‐ wards graduate school and eventually a challenging and meaningful career in the United States government. “