Scholarship News

2023 Emily de Montluzin Foreign Language Scholarship Awarded to Peyton Autumn Laurent
May 13, 2023

Our Lady Academy senior Peyton Autumn Laurent has been awarded the $5,000 Emily de Montluzin Foreign Language Scholarship for 2023. She becomes the thirty-sixth recipient of the scholarship, which is awarded annually by a board of directors to a superior foreign language student from any of the four high schools in Hancock County.

Laurent will enter the University of Mississippi, where she will major in mechanical engineering with a minor in French and a goal of attaining fluency in that language.

“French is important for engineering because French is the language that many multinational engineering companies use,” Laurent explains. “Being able to communicate with employers in other Francophone countries like Canada, countries in Europe, and in Africa is vital to being successful in my career.”

Describing her as “accomplished and gifted” and “an asset to the university that she chooses,” Jennifer Kayes, Laurent’s French teacher throughout her years at OLA, adds, “Peyton is one of the most intellectual students that I have taught in my career.” For those reasons Kayes appointed Laurent to be her intern and to assist in the instruction of her first-year French class.

An all-A student, Laurent has been elected to the French Honor Society, the Mu Alpha Theta Math Honor Society, and the National Honor Society.

Despite her highly challenging academic schedule including a number of honors courses, Laurent has found time to excel in soccer, participating actively in OLA Crescent Soccer and Gulf Coast United Soccer for the past four years. An avid soccer player since the age of three, she notes with pride that she is “related to Lucien Laurent, who was the first World Cup scorer in the 1930 World Cup.”

Laurent is the granddaughter of Mr. and Mrs. Leo L. Laurent, Sr., of Bay St. Louis, MS.

 

Emily de Montluzin Foreign Language Scholarship Board Raises the Amount of the Annual Scholarship to $5,000

The Board of Directors of the Emily de Montluzin Foreign Language Scholarship has announced that the amount of the annual Foreign Language Scholarship has been increased from $3,000 to $5,000, beginning with the 2021 award.

A bequest from the late Emily de Montluzin, who died on October 20, 2020, plus numerous gifts from friends and former students in her memory, have made possible the near doubling of the amount of the annual scholarship.

The Emily de Montluzin Foreign Language Scholarship was established in 1983 by former students and friends of Emily Hosmer de Montluzin on the occasion of her retirement as a Latin and French teacher at Bay Senior High School in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.

The scholarship is awarded each year to a graduating senior from any one of the high schools in Hancock County who has excelled in the study of a foreign language and plans to continue that study in a college or university of his or her choice. To date it has been presented to thirty-four exemplary foreign language students.

“Teaching was the love of Emily de Montluzin’s life,” said her daughter, Lorraine de Montluzin. “She would be so pleased that the scholarship established in her honor has reached this important milestone and will now be able to provide substantially more financial assistance to outstanding foreign language students in Hancock County.”

Joseph Wusnack, President of the Scholarship Board, added, “Emily de Montluzin spent many years as a teacher with the goal of thrusting students forward into the career path best for them. This scholarship, which bears her name, continues that goal.”

The Board has announced that all applications from qualified students must be postmarked no later than March 15 for consideration for the 2021 award.

 

News from Megan Krynen,
Recipient of the 2015 and 2016 Emily de Montluzin Foreign Language Scholarship awards

[Letter received from Megan Krynen, a graduate of Our Lady’s Academy (Class of 2015), recipient of both the 2015 and 2016 Emily de Montluzin Foreign Language Scholarship awards. After completing two degrees from the Croft Institute for International Studies at the University of Mississippi (where she double-majored in International Studies and Italian), she sent the Scholarship Board the following letter:]

April 2021

Dear Dr. Emily Lorraine de Montluzin,

It brought me great sadness to hear of your mother’s passing. I am very thankful for the impact you both had on my life. I graduated Ole Miss with a degree in Public Policy Leadership in May 2019 and then went to Italy for 6 months to study and finished my second degree in International Governance and politics / Italian. I moved to Washington, D. C. in January 2020 and now work in the U. S. Senate. I am pursuing a masters in Defense Strategies from the Naval War College. It has been way too long since I updated you so I wanted to offer my condolences and say thank you!

Sincerely,

Megan Krynen

 

Vote of Thanks

Whereas Ellis C. Cuevas has retired as a voting member from the Board of Directors of the Emily de Montluzin Foreign Language Scholarship Fund effective March 2020,

And whereas he has served faithfully and diligently as a member of the Board of Directors since the establishment of the Scholarship Fund in 1983 and as President of the Scholarship Fund for many years,

The Board of Directors votes its thanks and appreciation to Ellis C. Cuevas and accords him the status of President Emeritus of the Board.

Done March 26, 2020

 

News from Kirby Rhodes,
Recipient of the 2012 Emily de Montluzin Foreign Language Scholarship

April 27, 2016

Dear Board Members,

Wow. I looked up and I am less than three weeks away from graduating [from the University of Mississippi]. I know that it has been quite a while since I have written. . . . I believe the last time I wrote you was sometime during my sophomore year.

So, to catch you up: I have completed my minor in Arabic. In fact I finished taking Arabic classes shortly after the last time I wrote you. Since then, I have achieved second and third minors in psychology and intelligence and security studies. This past summer I had a wonderful opportunity to intern with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, better known as NCIS. And, no, not the TV show, although I would not mind Gibbs as a boss or DiNozzo as a partner. . . .

For this internship I moved myself up to Washington, DC, for three months. I learned many things while living and working up there, one of which was that I do not enjoy that big-city-living lifestyle. Lucky for me, most people who work in DC live outside the city and commute back and forth.

This past fall I interned with the Oxford Police Department. I made some great friends and learned many valuable lessons. Also during that semester I had the opportunity to travel to Canada and present at the 5 Eyes Analytical Conference. Five Eyes is an international meeting between the “five eyes” of intelligence, in other words, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. Government officials, military personnel, and intelligence analysts attend from all 5 countries each year. This year my group and I (there were 8 of us) presented in front of almost 400 people, all of which could be categorized into one of the groups listed above. Our topic was Russian foreign policy in the Middle East in the next 3-5 years.

This semester I have spend preparing for graduation and life afterwards. I am taking 18 hours, including a thesis course. In fact, I just completed my thesis and submitted it before I sat down to write you. My thesis topic is right-wing extremism and the threat it poses to law enforcement. Thirty pages, 25 sources, 14 weeks, and some tears, blood, and sweat later,I finally completed it! Come May 14th, I will graduate with cum laude honors and a B.S. in criminal justice and minors in Arabic, psychology, and intelligence and security studies.

Which brings me to my post-graduation plans. In a nutshell, I have no idea what I will be doing. I was accepted into the criminal justice Masters program here at Ole Miss. As of right now, that is where I will be in August. Fingers crossed that I get the graduate assistantship, because I will not have to pay tuition. I have also applied for positions with the Oxford Police Department and the United States Capitol Police. I have not yet heard from Oxford, but the Capitol Police want me to move on to the next phase of application. Basically there are a whole bunch of moving parts and I have options.

I hope this letter finds all of you well. I would like to once again tell everyone how grateful I am for having been gifted with this scholarship, way back in 2012. Has it really been four years already? Without it, I probably would not have attended Ole Miss. And I definitely would not be where I am today. So thank you!

Kirby Rhodes

 

Emily de Montluzin Foreign Language Scholarship Begins Fourth Decade of Awards to Superior Language Students
[printed in the Bay St. Louis, MS, Sea Coast Echo, 11 March 2015]

The Emily de Montluzin Foreign Language Scholarship this spring will begin its fourth decade of awarding scholarships to college-bound seniors from Hancock County high schools who have excelled in the study of foreign languages and undertake to continue that study in college.

The de Montluzin Scholarship was established in 1983 by friends and former students of Emily Hosmer de Montluzin on the occasion of her retirement as a Latin and French teacher at Bay Senior High School. Initially a $500 prize, the scholarship has grown, thanks to charitable donations from supporters over three decades, to a current award of $3,000 which may be used at any college of the recipient’s choice.

Since its founding the scholarship has been awarded to thirty superior foreign language students drawn from all four of Hancock County’s high schools and chosen in a rigorous competition by the scholarship’s board of directors.

The first winner of the Emily de Montluzin Scholarship was Mary Langenbacker, now an Ocean Springs attorney and member of the scholarship’s board.

“The Emily de Montluzin Foreign Language Scholarship was integral to my continued study of French at the college level,” Langenbacker says. “Even in its first year, the scholarship was a substantial sum equivalent to nearly an entire semester of tuition.

“Looking back thirty-one years, I still consider it an honor to be the first recipient of the scholarship bearing Mrs. de Montluzin’s name,” Langenbacker avers. “As a member of the scholarship fund’s board of directors, I now have the pleasure of presenting this scholarship to each annual recipient.”

Awards over the years have been given to Hancock County students embarking on study for a variety of careers that benefit directly or indirectly from knowledge of foreign languages, including diplomatic and government service, international business, teaching, law, medicine, nursing, engineering, translating Russian, and translating Arabic for the interdiction of terrorism. Several recipients have studied at the University of Mississippi’s Croft Institute of International Studies, and two have entered Ole Miss’s Chinese Language Flagship Program and Intensive Arabic Program, respectively.

In college, some scholarship winners have chosen to continue their study of French, Spanish, German, or Latin begun in their high school classrooms, while others have expanded their linguistic horizons by undertaking courses in additional languages such as ancient Greek, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic, programs of study that in some cases have encompassed study abroad.

“The ability to speak a foreign language fluently is tremendously enhanced by the opportunity to travel abroad—to France, to Morocco, to China, for example—and experience total immersion in the day-to-day conversation of a non-English-speaking setting,” says Emily de Montluzin. “Students who have that opportunity soon find themselves not just speaking but thinking and even dreaming in a foreign language! This is a tremendous accomplishment and one that is difficult to acquire in an American classroom. I am delighted that several of our recipients have used their scholarship awards specifically to finance a semester’s study overseas.”

Scholarship winners who have spent semesters abroad have had the opportunity to experience far more than formal classwork. They have acquired personal knowledge of the culture and folkloric heritage of their host countries. They have ridden camels, conversed with shopkeepers in bazaars, swum in the Mediterranean, and walked the Great Wall of China. They have also taken advantage of Europe’s extensive rail system and the relatively short distances separating the continent’s major cities to travel to other countries during school holidays.

One recent award winner, sending news of her semester abroad to the board of directors, wrote, “The scholarship has given me the opportunity to travel the world, which has always been a dream of mine. Thank you for opening these doors for me.”

The Emily de Montluzin Foreign Language Scholarship competition, which closes March 15 [edited to reflect current deadline], is open to seniors from any high school in Hancock County who have excelled in the study of a foreign language for at least two years and who have received composite scores of 25 or higher on the ACT test. The recipient must be committed to at least one year’s study of the same or another foreign language as a freshman in any college of his or her choice and must address in the letter of application the relevance of the study of a foreign language to his or her chosen path of study and career plans.

Previous Winners of the Emily de Montluzin Foreign Language Scholarship

1984: Mary Langenbacker (Bay Senior High School)
1985: George Paul (Bay Senior High School)
1986: J’lene Noto (Our Lady Academy)
1987: Georgiana Dagnall (Our Lady Academy)
1988: Joseph Overal (St. Stanislaus College Prep)
1989: Jennifer Schreiber (Hancock High School)
1990: Stacie Warren (Hancock High School)
1991: Julie Ladner (Bay Senior High School)
1992: Malacia Strom (Bay Senior High School)
1993: Carolyn Watts (Bay Senior High School)
1994: Katherine Edwards (Bay Senior High School)
1995: Jennifer Von Antz (Bay Senior High School)
1996: Amanda Desirée Wilcox (Bay Senior High School)
1997: Gleeson Murphy, Jr. (Hancock High School)
1998: Rachel Spear (Bay Senior High School)
1999: Luke Payne (Hancock High School)
2000: Heather Wopat (Bay Senior High School)
2001: Melissa Gaines (Bay Senior High School)
2002: Dustin Cody Bankston (Bay Senior High School)
2003: Alicia Asper (Our Lady Academy)
2004: Adair Beany (St. Stanislaus College Prep)
2005: Elizabeth Floyd (Bay Senior High School)
2006: Colleen O’Brien (Our Lady Academy)
2007: Leah Tucker (Our Lady Academy)
2008: Megan Gargiulo (Our Lady Academy)
2009: Charles Guy Wood, Jr. (St. Stanislaus College Prep)
2010: Rebecca Hightower (Hancock High School)
2011: Miranda Adams (Bay Senior High School)
2012: Kirby Laura Rhodes (Our Lady Academy)
2013: Nicki Lee Reeder (Our Lady Academy)
2014: Leah D. Sandoz (Our Lady Academy)