Kripa Bhagat

Kripa helps manage and advise on the Richard U. Light Fellowship’s portfolio of China and Korea programs. Growing up in a multilingual (Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, English) environment, Kripa learned the importance of cross-cultural communication at a young age and started her journey as a linguist with the formal study of Spanish, Italian, and Chinese. She participated in STARTALK summer Chinese language immersion programs as a high school student and is also a proud alumna of the Middlebury- C.V. Starr school in Beijing. She is passionate about helping students meet their linguistic goals and has demonstrated this commitment as an Education Ambassador for the Ameson Year in China program in Yiwu, Zhejiang, China,  as a Spanish language residential advisor and administrator at Middlebury-affiliated youth summer programs, and as Resident Director for the National Security Language Initiative for Youth Program (NSLI-Y) in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. She loves learning from her students and seeing how they apply their linguistic skills to their areas of interests! Kripa holds an M.A. in Chinese Linguistics from the University of Hawai’i- Manoa and a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Barnard College. In her free time, Kripa enjoys dancing, swimming, arts and crafts, and trying new recipes.