NSLI-Y Honors Arab American Heritage Month | Alumni Spotlight: Fatma

Fatma Elsayed participated in the 2018 NSLI-Y Summer Arabic program in Rabat, Morocco. Fatma is a heritage speaker of Arabic and speaks the Sudanese dialect at home, but her motivation for continued language study was driven by a desire to improve her writing and reading skills in Arabic for use in college and her future career. While on program, she also gained a strong appreciation for the diversity and nuances of the Arabic language as a whole, noting how different both Modern Standard Arabic and the Darija dialect spoken in Morocco were from her native Sudanese Arabic.

Fatma is grateful for the doors which NSLI-Y opened for her, both academically and professionally, and how it helped inspire her love for Arabic and Middle Eastern history and culture. She is now a student at Yale University studying History and Modern Middle Eastern Studies, alongside a certificate in Arabic. She is grateful for the foundational skills that NSLI-Y helped her to build in the language. NSLI-Y also inspired her to seek out other ways to travel internationally, and Fatma recently returned from working abroad in Dubai as a Youth Ambassador for the USA Pavilion at Expo 2020. She was one of several NSLI-Y alumni serving as Youth Ambassadors who all shared a common love for living, studying, and working abroad!