At the University of Notre Dame, Ben Testani accumulated a wide variety of academic experiences.
As an International Economics major, he completed a concentration in Arabic and the Middle East. Through his language studies, he achieved the High Intermediate certificate for Modern Standard Arabic through the American Council on the Teaching of the Foreign Languages, or ACTFL.
His regional focus also included a semester spent studying abroad in Amman, Jordan. In Amman, he developed amiya conversational abilities in the Levantine Arabic dialect.
Through the Economics Department at Notre Dame, he also completed a senior research project. With the goal of completing a miniature thesis, he completed original quantitative and qualitative research under guidance of two tenured faculty within the department. He tackled the question of whether or not American combat deaths during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan influenced the rate of domestic hate crimes committed against Muslims and Arabs. His project received high marks and is available here for your review.
He also majored in Spanish through the Romance Languages Department. He has studied Spanish for ten years now and has developed near-fluency, especially when reading and writing.
