Polish

The Polish program gives you access to the language and culture of the one of the largest European countries. The geostrategic and economic importance of Poland is on the rise in recent years given the volatile situation inside the European Union and its even more troublesome relations with Russia. Our program furthermore enables you to study the vast Polish diaspora in the United States, Ireland, Great Britain, and Germany. In addition, studying Polish greatly facilitates the acquisition of related Slavic languages such as Russian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, or Czech.

If you are a heritage speaker from Polish community or their friend/partner/spouse, it goes without saying that our classes would give you a deeper understanding of the culture and the necessary background for a richer participation in this heritage community.

All our classes are rooted in cutting-edge methodology, they are geared toward achieving concrete proficiency benchmarks giving our students tangible real-life skills. The lead instructor is an accomplished author specializing in the nexus of language and culture as well as certified language tester and interpreter. Our classes are focused on:

• Digital Humanities
• History of Slavic Languages
• Heritage speakers class
• Conversation and Composition
• Individual supervised work general Slavic courses

The combination of the aforementioned majors with our minor or classes have lead our students into the following typical career paths:

• State Department,
• Department of Justice,
• National Security Agency,
• United States Agency for International Development
• and many other entities.
• Law
• academia
• prestigious graduate programs
• medicine 

Unexpectedly, many of our alumni end up in medical school. They claim that the kind of humanistic knowledge that they gain in our program help them being admitted into these schools.

One of the hallmarks of our program is startling success of our students in securing prestigious national fellowships, such as Fulbright and NSEP giving them an opportunity to spend time abroad while being instrumental in their securing coveted positions in government agencies, academia, and industry.

Both our individual classes and the minor constitute a perfect complement to various majors giving our students a competitive advantage of the expertise in a lesser known cultures and their language. Historically, most our students came from:

• political science,
• global studies,
• religious studies,
• history,
• anthropology,
• business and economics,
• engineering,
• and other language majors (most notably Russian). 

A large presence of Polish heritage community in the Valley of the Sun gives our students an excellent opportunity to immerse themselves into these cultures by visiting stores, clubs, restaurants, places of worship, etc. and attending heritage festivals. Even after several weeks of instructions our students will be able to test their skills locally by greeting heritage speakers, ordering, asking simple questions, etc.

Please contact Danko.Sipka@asu.edu with any questions about the program. We greatly look forward to discussing the program with you and hopefully having you in our classes!