Twenty University of Georgia students have been awarded summer-term scholarships for study or internships abroad by the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship program of the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

The program is named after former U.S. Rep. Benjamin A. Gilman from New York, who retired in 2002 after serving in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chairing the House Foreign Relations Committee.

The program aims to diversify the students who study and intern abroad and encourages them to choose nontraditional study and intern destinations, especially those outside of Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand such as Armenia, Ghana, Morocco, Peru, South Korea and Thailand.

The State Department recognizes “a critical need” for speakers of the following languages which the students are encouraged to study: Arabic (all dialects), Chinese (all dialects), Bahasa Indonesia, JapaneseTurkic (Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Kyrgz, Turkish, Turkmen, Uzbek), Persian (Farsi, Dari, Kurdish, Pashto, Tajik), Indic (Hindi, Urdu, Nepali, Sinhala, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Sindhi), Korean, Russian and Swahili.

Award recipients are chosen by a competitive selection process and must use the award to defray eligible study or intern abroad costs including program tuition, room and board, books, local transportation, insurance and international airfare.

Eighteen of the 20 UGA students who have accepted the scholarships are listed as follows with their hometowns and their destination countries: Ashley Ayeni, Stone Mountain, Costa Rica; Karishma Dayani, Grayson, Spain; Aniya Hamilton, Tucker, Ghana; Aiden Holley, Nashville, Tennessee, Armenia; Wanyi Jiang, Woodstock, Italy; Garrett Johnson, Dallas, Georgia, Italy and Poland; Jeriann Jones, Decatur, South Korea;

Janine Kfouri, Lawrenceville, Spain; Sang Lee, Columbus, South Korea; Waynie Lee, Suwanee, China; Peri Levey, Voorhees, New Jersey, Costa Rica; Nicole Manu, Loganville, Peru; Charles Orgbon, Dacula, Spain; Roma Parikh, Marietta, Morocco; Cynthia Ponir, Marietta, Peru; Jessica Sagastume, Athens, South Africa; Suyuan Tan, Marietta, Thailand and Ha Truong, Suwanee, Tanzania.

Gilman scholarships also were awarded to recipients from the following Georgia institutions: 11, Emory University; 2 Georgia College and State University; 1, Georgia Gwinnett College; 3, Georgia Perimeter College; 2, Georgia State University; 4, Georgia Institute of Technology; 12, Spellman College and 10, Valdosta State University.

For more information, call Laura Paris at 706-542-9200 or send an email to laparis@uga.edu