While at Wellesley College, 2010 graduate Julia Chrusciel would often overhear her Turkish roommate speaking to family and friends in her native language. Intrigued, Chrusciel began to teach herself the language from a book.

Chrusciel, the daughter of James and Marguerite Chrusciel of Western Springs, Ill., has been aided in her pursuit of her language study with a U.S. Department of State Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) to study Turkish in Istanbul, Turkey, this summer.

"I am incredibly excited to be living in Turkey and experiencing the culture firsthand," she said. "I think it is difficult to say to what I am most looking forward to, since I find that the things you love most about a place are usually things you never knew of — or could never have imagined — before you went there."

The CLS Program is part of a U.S. government effort to expand dramatically the number of Americans studying and mastering critical-need foreign languages. Chrusciel will attend a fully funded intensive language institute and partake in cultural enrichment experiences for the summer.

While at Wellesley, Chrusciel wrote for The Wellesley News student paper, served as a writing teaching assistant and was a member of the Belly Dancing Society. She previously interned for the University of California Press in Berkeley, Calif., and as an ESL teaching assistant at the International House in the republic of Georgia.

Following her summer abroad, Chrusciel, who majored in English and anthropology at Wellesley, plans to pursue a Ph.D. in linguistic anthropology, and eventually become a professor, teaching and conducting research.

Since 1875, Wellesley College has been a leader in providing an excellent liberal arts education for women who will make a difference in the world. Its 500-acre campus near Boston is home to 2,300 undergraduate students from all 50 states and 68 countries. For more information, go to www.wellesley.edu.