reginald.hefner

I was a Chinese linguist when I served in the Army during Vietnam after I learned Chinese at the Defense Language Institute (DLI) in Monterey, CA., where I was an Honor student in the Mandarin-Chinese class. After nearly five years on Active Duty, I left the military and ended up homeless for about 6-months because nobody would rent to Vietnam veterans. Most most indelible memory was walking through San Francisco Airport in my khaki uniform, having arrived from Hong Kong, and being spit on by people on my face, arms, and military uniform as I carried my duffel bag. Eventually I became a Russian major at University of Maryland College park where I also studied Arabic, Sanskrit, and Comparative Slavic Linguistics. Two years later I also earned a B.A. in Chinese from the University of MD., College Park. Much later in life I earned a B.A. in Spanish Summa cum laude and a B.A. in French with a German Minor Summa cum Laude from Shippensburg Univeristy of Pennsylvania where I had also finished all the required coursework for certification as a secondary education foreign language teacher, including Methods of Instruction courses. I attend Middlebury College's summer intensive Arabic courses 9 summers (mostly when the courses used to be 9 weeks long) and eventually earned an M.A. in Arabic with a concentration in Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (TAFL) in 2015, one day after my father died. In 1989, I served as a Japanese to English interpreter at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo and when Middlebury did not create a Doctor of Modern Languages (DML) for Arabic, as expected in 2016, I attended the Middlebury summer intensive School of Hebrew in 2016, 2017, and 2018. I was accepted in 2019,but did not receive enough financial aid to attend. I was accepted for the Middlebury College highest level Japanese School for Summer 2020, but had thoracic aorta surgery and also lost job, owing to COVID in March that year. I was accepted for the Middlebury M.A. Program in French, but could not start this summer because I was only offered 625.00 and did not have the rest of the ten thousand dollars required for the first summer. So, I did STARtalk instead.