Nicholas Viggiano, a senior and student in AP Russian at Cherokee High School, has been awarded a second scholarship by the U.S. State Department to study Russian. The National Strategic Language Initiative for Youth (NSLI-Y) Scholarship is awarded to outstanding students of critically needed languages. Russian is ranked by the U.S. State Department as a critical language along with Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Korean, Persian, and Turkish. Viggiano is one of only 20 American students who will travel to Chisinau, Moldava to live and study Russian for one year. This is his second NSLI-Y Scholarship. During the summer of 2014, before his senior year at Cherokee, Viggiano lived with a host family and studied Russian at a university in Russia.
