Chris Pierce Selected as an Alternate for Two Prestigious Language Study awards
Shanna High has been selected as an alternate for a Boren Fellowship to study in Brazil during the 2020-2021 academic year. Shanna is currently a master’s student in the Department of Anthropology with a focus in biological anthropology. If promoted to awardee status, Shanna will study Portuguese in Florianopolis, Brazil, through the University Studies Abroad Consortium at the Federal University of Santa Catarina.
The David L. Boren Fellowships are sponsored by the National Security Education Program (NSEP), a federal initiative designed to build a broader and more qualified pool of U.S. citizens with foreign language and international skills. The fellowships provide U.S. graduate students with resources to acquire language skills and experience in countries critical to the future security and stability of the United States. In exchange for funding, Boren award recipients agree to work in the federal government for a period of at least one year. “The National Security Education Program,” according to Dr. Michael A. Nugent, Director of the Defense Language and National Security Education Office (DLNSEO), “is helping change the U.S. higher education system and the way Americans approach the study of foreign languages and cultures.”
A lifelong career goal of Shanna’s is to work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as a forensic scientist or anthropologist. She hopes to use the skills of handling and analyzing humans remains she has gained through the Forensic Anthropology Center at Texas State (FACTS) and the center’s Operation Identification (OpID) program, where she works with migrant remains to identify, and ultimately repatriate, individuals whose bodies were discovered along the Texas-Mexico border. Driven by a passion to make the largest possible impact on the lives of immigrants, Shanna believes a career in federal service can help her provide the basic human rights immigrants deserve when trying to cross the border and will allow her to provide a path to closure for families who have lost a loved one – creating a safer country through forensics.
This year, the Institute of International Education (IIE), which administers the awards on behalf of NSEP, received 784 applications from undergraduate students for the Boren Scholarships and awarded 217; 268 graduate students applied for the Boren Fellowships and 119 were awarded. The selected Boren Scholars and Fellows intend to study in 44 countries throughout Africa, Asia, Eurasia, Latin America, and the Middle East. They will study 46 different languages. The most popular languages include Mandarin, Arabic, Russian, Portuguese, Korean, French, Turkish, and Indonesian. Given the unprecedented global COVID-19 pandemic, IIE will work flexibly with 2020 awardees to ensure that as many as possible are able to proceed with their overseas language study when it is safe and feasible to do so.