Grant information

FLAS fellowships, authorized under Title VI of the Higher Education Act and administered by the US Department of Education, provide graduate grantees full tuition and a $15,000 stipend for one academic year. The fellowship is intended for graduate students undergoing advanced training in  designated foreign languages in combination with area studies, international studies, or international aspects of professional studies. Designated foreign languages include Russian, Ukrainian, Romanian, Kazakh, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Turkish, or Hungarian.

The term of the fellowship is for one academic year or less. CREEES awards one fellowship each year. Applicants in multi-year programs must re-apply each year. Applicants should understand that CREEES's ability to offer FLAS fellowships is contigent upon Congressional funding and US Department of Education's approval. The selection of awardees is made annually by the CREEES fellowship committee, which favors candidates who have not previously received FLAS support. A FLAS award will be reduced by the amount of any other funding that a student receives in exess of full tuituion and the allowable stipend amount.

Students applying to the REEES M.A. or Coterminal M.A. Programs are encouraged to upload their FLAS fellowship application concurrently with their M.A. application.

 

eligibility

To be considered for a Stanford academic-year FLAS fellowship in REEES languages, an applicant must:

  • Be a citizen or permanent resident of the U.S. or a permanent resident of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands.
  • Be enrolled in, applying to, or accepted to a degree program at Stanford University.
  • Pledge to enroll each academic quarter of the FLAS award period in the REEES language course at the level appropriate for that student (literature and directed reading courses do not qualify). FLAS awardees will take a minimum of 3 units in the grant language for each of the three academic quarters. Language courses must be taken for a letter grade and at the appropriate level as determined by the Stanford Language Center.
  • Pledge to enroll each academic quarter of the FLAS award period in an area studies, international studies, or international aspects of professional studies (law, medicine, business and education) course.
  • Agree to devote the entire award period to full-time study, as defined by the University, without employment or research for which payment is received, unless it can be shown that the employment is part of the student's degree-earning requirements and does not prolong the time normally required for completion of University requirements.

 

applying

The Academic Year 2016-2017 FLAS Fellowship competition is open.

All applicants are required to submit the following materials:

  1. FLAS application form (available above), including a 1 page statement of purpose discussing your educational and career goals, and the significance of the proposed language training to these goals
  2. two letters of recommendations (letters are encouraged from instructors in Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies disciplines)
  3. an unofficial copy of your Stanford transcript
  4. submit a statement of all current funding being received for graduate studies/research
  5. plan to enroll in Stanford Language Center courses of a qualifying language at the second-year level or higher in the awarded year (not applicable for dissertation research fellowships)

Applications should be submitted electronically to CREEES.

 

criteria for evaluating applications

Department of Education guidelines include the following:

  • Awards may be made to applicants in a wide variety of humanities and social science undergraduate and graduate degree programs, as well as professional fields.
  • Low priority is given to applicants whose fluency in the proposed language of study approaches that of a native speaker.
  • Low priority is also given to applicants who have not taken the equivalent of at least one academic year of college-level of the proposed REEES language of study prior to the FLAS award period.

CREEES priorities include (in order):

  • Applicants to the CREEES MA program
  • Applicants to the Stanford School of Law and School of Education
  • Stanford undergraduates

Students who fall outside the above three categories are especially encouraged to contact CREEES to determine eligibility.