Project GO helps ROTC students expand their world view through language learning
Extensive international travel is a given for many members of the armed forces.
But imagine being a young college student, having never been away from home and suddenly finding yourself in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language and know little to nothing about the culture.
That’s the position Michelle Bravo found herself in during her first-ever deployment to Germany as a 19-year-old ROTC student.
“They dropped me off and there I was. I had never been away from home, I had to figure out how to get a driver’s license, I didn’t speak any foreign languages,” she said.
That uncomfortable situation is now happening less and less to our ROTC students thanks to Project GO, a nationwide training program sponsored by the Defense Language and National Security Education Office within the U.S. Department of Defense that provides the students with the opportunity for intensive study of critical foreign languages and the chances to use that knowledge abroad.
ASU Air Force ROTC cadets Forrest Babbitt (left) and Parker Smith stand proudly outside of the humble yurt they built in Kyrgyzstan. Top photo: Babbitt (right) and Smith prepare to explore the expansive Kyrgyz mountain ranges. All photos courtesy Parker Smith.
For four years, Bravo served as Project GO’s executive officer for the Army ROTC at Arizona State University.
“Having gone through those experiences, and through the ROTC experience, I understand what it’s like to be a college student seeking academic experience but also being involved in the military,” she said. “It’s amazing what they’re doing now with Project GO.”
ASU is one of 25 universities in the U.S. that offer the program, and it specializes in Russian, Turkish and Indonesian. The languages offered by each university vary based on each institution’s capacity to teach them.
Through Project GO, ROTC students from any university in the country can apply to participate in a three-month summer program during which they spend time both at ASU learning the language and abroad using the language and being immersed in the culture daily.
“Most of the universities, students just go to the university and study or they go abroad. But ASU does both,” said Kathleen Evans-Romaine, director of ASU’s Critical Languages Institute who oversees its summer and academic-year study-abroad programs.
Evans-Romaine explained that because ROTC students often have service-related obligations to fulfill during their summers and rigorous schedules during the academic year, taking advantage of study abroad opportunities can be difficult.
“For many students this is their only chance, which is why we give them both; that is, we train them [at ASU] and also take them abroad. So they get the language and then they go over and they can get an insider’s view of the culture since they know the language to some extent,” she said.
“It’s a very different experience than going over there and being a tourist or having somebody take you around and living with a host family but speaking English the whole time.”
