OURS National Scholarships

We are very pleased to announce that seven UC Berkeley students have been awarded the U.S. Government’s Critical Language Scholarship (CLS), a fully-funded 8–10-week overseas language and cultural immersion program for American undergraduate and graduate students at every level of language learning. The next application deadline will be in November 2025 (for summer 2026 programs). Students in any year of college are eligible to apply! Please join us in congratulating the following students: Alexandra “Sasha” Bergseid (’29, EECS) will be spending the summer in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, continuing her study of Russian.

Rising senior Danielle Tran, an English major minoring in Creative Writing and Education, has been selected as one of the outstanding undergraduates in the 2024 cohort of Beinecke Scholars. This prestigious scholarship provides $35,000 ($5,000 prior to graduate study and $15,000 per year) for two years of graduate study in the arts, humanities, or social sciences. Eighty colleges and universities from across the U.S. (including UC Berkeley) are invited to nominate one student for the scholarship, and twenty scholarships are awarded nationwide. Most Beinecke recipients are at the top of

Mengyu Dong (Political Science/History, ‘15) has been awarded a Knight-Hennessy Scholarship to support her graduate studies in journalism at Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences. Recipients of this prestigious scholarship are selected from an international pool of applicants based on their independence of thought, purposeful leadership, and civic mindset. In addition to receiving financial support for their graduate programs, Knight-Hennessy Scholars gain exposure to a wide range of disciplines and cultures in their cohort and participate in the King Global Leadership Program, which is designed to develop transformational leadership capabilities.