Undergraduate Student Excellence
As Tennessee’s flagship university, we have a commitment to light the way for others and to serve as a catalyst for opportunities – on our campus and in communities near and far.
Fulbright Awards
In partnership with more than 140 countries worldwide, the Fulbright US Student Program offers opportunities to passionate and accomplished graduating college seniors, graduate students, and young professionals. More than 2,200 Fulbright awards are earned by US students annually, giving them the opportunity to study, conduct research, exchange ideas, and investigate critical issues facing the world from a global perspective.
For the 2022-23 academic year, 10 students from a variety of majors in the College of Arts and Sciences received Fulbright awards, continuing the tradition of UT as one of the top producers of Fulbright students in the SEC. Recipients of Fulbright awards for the 2023-24 academic year were announced May 17, 2023. Read about their plans.
Critical Language Scholarship
A program in the US Department of State, the Critical Language Scholarship seeks to expand the number of Americans studying languages that are essential for the nation’s engagement with the world. Recipients spend eight to 10 weeks overseas learning one of 15 languages—Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bangla, Chinese, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Punjabi, Russian, Swahili, Turkish, or Urdu—and serve as ambassadors representing the diversity of the US and building lasting relationships with people in their host countries.
The program includes intensive language instruction and cultural enrichment experiences. Recipients are expected to continue their language study beyond the scholarship and to apply their critical language skills in their future careers.
Diba Seddighi, a senior from Farragut, Tennessee, studying global public health in the College Scholars Program, will head to Ankara, Turkey. As a volunteer with Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, Seddighi saw an influx of Turkish immigrants in the Knoxville area and struggled with how impersonal it felt to not be able to directly communicate with them.
Learn more about her plans for this scholarship.
Boren Fellowship
Jack Schwartz, a second-year political science PhD candidate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, from Lambertville, Michigan, will pursue Arabic in Amman, Jordan, with support from a Boren Fellowship, which provides up to $25,000 for language and cultural study in countries critical to the security and stability of the US.
Researching conflict in the Middle East, Schwartz began encountering Arabic in his readings.
“In my undergrad, I took four years of Russian and I always enjoyed learning languages as a side hobby, so I started dabbling in Arabic,” he said.
