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Quinn Mecham on why interdisciplinary degrees make sense—plus his ideas on traveling smarter after seeing 100+ countries.
We set out to learn from seven alumni face-to-face in Uzbekistan, Barcelona, London, Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, and Los Angeles.
Explore our last forty years and review the global vision shaping what the Kennedy Center has become—including comments from President Holland, Commissioner Eyring, and today’s International Vice President Forste.
Our director sheds light on how gospel understanding shapes education in international and area studies.
This collection of poetry was selected by Frederick G. Williams, former Gerrit
de Jong Jr. Distinguished Professor of Luso-Brazilian Studies. Selections were chosen for their literary merit and include a range of topics and viewpoints.
de Jong Jr. Distinguished Professor of Luso-Brazilian Studies. Selections were chosen for their literary merit and include a range of topics and viewpoints.
Recent statements by President Russell M. Nelson and other church leaders offer insights into how to think about differences among people—and offer important guidance in thinking about racism through what President Nelson called a “journey of understanding and overcoming.”
We don’t have to look far to find a long history of inaccurate and damaging approaches to teaching non-Africans about the African diaspora. But there are better ways to learn about it—and some educators and institutions are evolving to adopt them.
Deborah Taylor shares how moving from a “conversation about race” to a broad, global view where becoming informed helps Black students make decisions that shape the world.
Isabella Errigo was awarded a prestigious Fulbright research grant during the summer of 2022. She is currently in Ecuador, building on her master’s program research about the impact of land use on aquatic systems.
Brooke Dean’s expertise involves helping people and solving problems creatively, a skill
set that has been invaluable in her role as a U.S. diplomat in Asia.
The little bits that we personally are able to contribute are seen by the Lord. He brings it all together in a great flywheel that begins to spin. I am thankful to be a small part of what the Lord is doing on the earth.
Regardless of your chosen career path, a key element of your success will be the expertise you develop and the value that expertise will bring to society. As you develop expertise in your chosen fields, cultivate intellectual humility.
In 2022, BYU claimed the No. 1 ranking among U.S. universities for the most students receiving awards, ending up with twelve Boren Scholarship winners and a Boren Fellow. Why are so many BYU students receiving this prestigious national foreign-language scholarship?
When Ashlen Lemon, a linguistics major and TESOL minor, heard about the Fulbright English Teaching Assistant (ETA) Program in Cambodia, the timing felt providential. At the time, Lemon was in Cambodia studying culture and the Khmer language at the Center for Khmer Studies, and she had heard about the Fulbright program through her classmates there.
Jo Huey, a Middle East studies/Arabic (MESA) major, will be the first to admit that she took a roundabout path to studying the Middle East and Arabic. While serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ in Malaysia, she was applying to transfer to BYU, but she had minimal time to research different majors. When she noticed MESA listed, it caught her attention.
Marren Haneberg is launching a global career in which understanding risk is the plan.
The more time we spend in the wetland, the more we learn about it; and the more we learn about it, the more we realize that its beauty is fragile and threatened. It exists in a balance.
Many see the curated externalities of a study abroad on an Instagram feed: familiar photo spots, group adventures, new insights, food discoveries. But for John Talbot, BYU professor of English and director of the study abroad to Siena, Italy, disruption is intentional and uncertainty should be considered a programmatic skill set.
Since my husband and I are now fully COVID vaccinated, we have felt comfortable traveling within the US. It was our turn to be New Zealand. Here’s a back-and-forth look at the last trip we took pre-pandemic and the first trip we took post-vaccination.
Is the worldwide pandemic a lesson in global empathy? Technology writer and MIT professor Sherry Turkle thinks so. A New York Times review of her memoir, The Empathy Diaries, says she hopes “that the pandemic has afforded us a view of one another’s problems and vulnerabilities in a way we might not have had as much access to before.”
At its core, this is a story of love—God’s love. This is my path to conversion, in which humility played a key role.
Blaine Tueller was at church with his family in Washington, DC. A prominent Latter-day Saint greeted him and began a conversation. Upon learning of Tueller’s career as a diplomat, the man declared, “You can’t be a good Latter-day Saint and be in the Foreign Service,” and abruptly walked away without explaining why the two were incompatible.
My path to the US Department of State, like those of many others’, was not direct. I spent the 2018–19 year as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow, but a delay in gaining an interim security clearance necessitated an adjustment in my plans.
David M. Kennedy, born 21 July 1905 in Randolph, Utah, lived his life committed to principle, service, and excellence.
From the history of the world to the current terrorist threat, the campus community is invited on a reader’s journey to explore issues, principles, and conditions facing mankind in the twenty-first century through the Kennedy Center’s Book of the Semester.
Ray C. Hillam took over the reins at the Kennedy Center in 1985. He brought a unique perspective to the role of director, thanks in part to firsthand experience with international politics and conflict.
In a real sense, human societies, whether portrayed as developed or developing, are designated in the prefatory section of the Doctrine and Covenants simply as “Babylon the Great,” whose fundamental tendency is to “seek not the Lord to establish his righteousness.”
Keith Mines, a BYU alumnus (1982) with over twelve years of experience in the Foreign Service, volunteered from August 2003 to February 2004 as the provincial governance coordinator in the Sunni Triangle of Iraq.
Ray C. Hillam took over the reins at the Kennedy Center in 1985. He brought a unique perspective to the role of director, thanks in part to firsthand experience with international politics and conflict.
My comments reflect changes in U.S. policy since 9/11 and are organized around two topics that are closely related politically, though analytically distinct. One is American primacy, and the other is Anti-Americanism.
When Donald B. Holsinger became director of the Kennedy Center in 1997, he brought with him a wealth of experience.
Exposure cultivates understanding. That is the guiding force behind Beyond the Border, a five-film series produced by the Kennedy Center in partnership with Combat Films and Research (CF&R).
A major challenge, some would call it a dilemma, that the world faces is how to be modern. The discourse of development, especially through the concept of modernization, is decidedly biased. It can be said that the intellectual precursor of modernization was the European enlightenment.
Decades before the official history began to be logged on the time line, dedicated, visionary faculty and administrators moulded proposals for courses and programs—often compromising what they wanted with what the budget would support. Two decades of official Kennedy Center history has now passed, and the center has recently been given administrative support to ensure its continued progress.
When I was on the Arizona regional board of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (now the National Conference for Community and Justice), I received a book entitled People written and illustrated by Peter Spier.
Religious, as well as social, economical, or political, pluralism developed from the beginning in one form or another. The one religious form, the original, came by direct revelation from God giving knowledge of who to worship and how to worship and giving mankind a plan of happiness, also called the plan of redemption.
A recent boom in BYU’s foreign studies originated from the Kennedy Center. By encouraging students and faculty alike to think Europe, the Center for the Study of the Europe (CSE) has sparked, maintained, and expanded research activities across campus.
What I’d like to talk about is the special role of America in the world today, and the enormous controversy which surrounds the position of America as the world’s only super power.
I come to this area of international politics from a backwards part of western Europe, which has retained the integrity of its own local quarrel over hundreds of years. The whole history of European integration is a triumph of ideas over adversity.
The BYU performing groups have touched the lives of millions across the world beginning in the early 1960s.
After a brief fling with democracy and post-9/11 solidarity with the United States, Russia seems to be slipping back onto more familiar ground.
Factors that contributed to the Islamic Translation Series add up to far more than just chance in the mind of Daniel C. Peterson, professor of Islamic studies at BYU. Since the earliest conception in 1993, Peterson has felt the hand of providence in his work.
Imagine that Adam and Eve must have been extraordinary poets. Their original and pure language of nature was undisturbed by custom and the past. When they spoke and named animals and plants for the first time, they brought those things into a living intimacy with their own lives, and the language they used reflected their own history and place within the created world they had been gifted by a loving Father.
Ancient and modern prophets have repeatedly reminded us of the sacred responsibility we have toward each other. The opportunity and obligation to serve our neighbors is codified in the great commandment...
Water is fundamental to quality of life and a decent standard of living. Throughout the ages, peoples of the world have settled near water sources and thrived when there was abundance. Because of the rich, fertile Nile valley, Egypt, often considered the cradle of civilization, developed a society with diverse occupations.
Art is a medium of expression where the individual and culture come together. What happens to the individual artist when culture becomes a tool of the government? How does politics impact art as an expression of the times? Can art and culture survive and overcome government repression?
The densely populated archipelago of Indonesia has more explosive volcanoes, major earthquakes, and destructive tsunamis than any other nation.
One of the most successful ad campaigns ever launched in the United States features the ubiquitous milk moustache on celebrities’ upper lips with the simple caption “Got Milk?”
What began as cultural briefs for leaders in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has grown into a thriving educational product line used by K–12 educators, corporations, government, and the military.
My three weeks in Spain in May 2001 came about because of my work on American novelist Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop
Few places in the world remain both unexplored and unfamiliar to people. One such place is rural Mexico, an area that is rapidly changing and rarely seen by outsiders. Fortunately, the photography of Juan Rulfo (1917–86) offers a unique glimpse into rural Mexico.
This statement captures the feelings of an academic who began visiting London as part of BYU’s Study Abroad Program, visits that ignited a passion for London and resulted in the 2004 publication of Walking through London’s History.
The Mukono Town Academy (MTA), a secondary school of approximately five hundred students, is located in Mukono Town, an agricultural base of around 300,000 people. The school was co-founded and is now owned by Christopher Mugimu, a native Ugandan and doctoral candidate in educational leadership and foundations at BYU.
Winter evenings in England fold in with soft gray and blue tones and a breeze of cool air, often accompanied by a light drizzle. Streetlamps cast halos of light, and the cozy city buzz drones on as people pop umbrellas, board double-decker buses, or duck into Tube stations heading for home.
Many communities are recognizing that economic growth, as currently practiced, has many perils. Well-intended efforts to stimulate economic growth and to create jobs in the community, often result in unforeseen costs that may diminish or negate the good created by the jobs. This is a preliminary report on an early phase of a larger project to put decision-making tools in practicing managers’ hands that will help them understand the long run ecologic consequences as well as the short run consequences of economic development strategies and policies.
Islam’s relationship with the West, though it goes far into antiquity, has been overburdened with rivalries and marred by conflicts.
It has become increasingly important to understand the cultural context in which U.S. foreign and defense policies operate. Our failure to anticipate the tragic terrorist attacks of 9/11 was more than a “failure of imagination,” as the 9/11 Commission formally concluded, and it was more than a failure of the intelligence community.
In 1669, the French playwright Molière published Tartuffe, a classic portrait of a religious shyster. By pretending to be a holy man and spiritual guide, Tartuffe almost completely swindles a gullible man’s fortune and ruins his family.
In May 2001, Brigham Young University sent out its fourth group of undergraduate business students to Asian sites: Tokyo, Singapore, Vietnam, Beijing, and Hong Kong.
It was still dark when Antonio sat bolt upright in his bed, eyes bulging like boiled eggs. “Did you hear that?” he asked. On cue, the Muezzin’s second call to prayer filtered through the dusty slit in the wall, our room’s only window in the misnamed Hotel Palace.
Biodiversity—a relatively new word in the English language that is unfamiliar to most—is simply a contraction of biological diversity that all of us encounter personally on a daily basis.
In 2004, my family and I returned to Utah, when I became Barrick Gold Corporation’s regional manager for Continuous Improvement.
Growing up, my dad had a stable teaching job with state health benefits. And with my doctor/uncle living next door, my family had few run-ins with illness that couldn’t be attended to by heading next door when Uncle Kim’s Jeep pulled up in the driveway.
Ben, a bright, but unfocused university student, recently shared his academic desires with me. I had known of his phenomenal abilities with computers, his excellent people skills, his unbounded love for learning, and his never-ending questions.
China, Jordan, and Ukraine may not seem to have much in common, but for two years they have been linked through at least one avenue: BYU. To become better known and understood in the international arena, the university has targeted these three countries to be part of BYU’s “Special Country Focus” (SCF).
A couple of years ago I was sitting on a flight to Hawaii for a professional conference. Being somewhat a social person, I struck up a conversation with the gentleman sitting next to me and asked him, “Are you going for business or pleasure?"
Teaching is more than “going by the book”—using overheads and textbook demonstrations— and, in this case, more than teaching English. It is sharing hope and imparting skills which open the door of opportunity to many who may not have otherwise entered it.
Development education, or the use of education as a tool for human capital development, is an intensely interesting and diverse field.
Twenty-six hundred years ago, a brisk trade in frankincense put caravans on the desert and ships on the sea.
The literature on international development is generally pretty pessimistic, perhaps because the problems are so daunting and difficult to address, failures have such enormous consequences for poor people, and governments give this issue low priority.
One of the newest BYU organizations to become involved with both domestic and international development is the Center for Economic Self-Reliance, founded in 2003.
For too long, the academic field of international development has been characterized by disciplinary claims to exclusive truths frequently resulting in petty academic battles and sophomoric snubbings.
I remember there was a great celebration when the San Pedro Fishermen’s Cooperative1 received its license from the Department of Commerce. They hadn’t asked for a fish and surely didn’t need me to teach them how to fish.
Historically, Brigham Young University has not had a program focusing on the modern Middle East. After 9/11, the day that President Bush declared that the U.S. was sending troops into Afghanistan, we began to rethink that.
In November 2008, we had the pleasure of hosting an anniversary program and dinner in recognition of the Kennedy Center’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Our keynote speaker was Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, who presided over the creation of the center in 1983 as BYU’s president.
I remember approaching graduation from the Kennedy Center with a feeling of abject terror. I’m sure part of it was unpaid parking tickets or library fees that I’d have to cover before I got my diploma.
Through their involvement with NAFSA, BYU has an increased ability to make a difference in the world of international education and has gained an international reputation for their academic programs abroad for students...
I must say whenever I hear the phrase: “going through the front door” or some variation of it in connection with the expansion of the Church, I ask myself why the Lord, or His Church would ever go through any other than the front door.
On Friday afternoon 14 January 2011, my husband, our two small children, and I were packing and preparing for our flight the next morning to Tunisia.
In recent years, the expression “you are what you eat” has been everywhere; it has graced book titles, magazine articles, television series, radio programs, and electronic media outlets.
In recent years, the expression “you are what you eat” has been everywhere; it has graced book titles, magazine articles, television series, radio programs, and electronic media outlets.
I am the fourth generation of my family to live and work in China and to make China the focus of our lives’ work. My sister who has blonde hair and blue eyes would often tell people that she was half Chinese.
Mr. Lee unloads the back of his small truck as a few people stand and watch. He thanks them for coming on this day. Together they begin writing “messages of love” with markers on sheets of paper.
In today’s presentation, Asia will refer to the region designated by the Church as the Asia Area. This area ranges from Mongolia on the north to Indonesia on the south and from Taiwan on the east to Pakistan on the west.
In August 2011, I attended a conference in Sweden organized by the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, a Korean think tank, and the FOI (Swedish Defense Agency).
Brian Anderson, an international relations and Russian major, did not imagine the opportunities he would be presented with when he interned with the Slavic Center for Law and Justice in Moscow, Russia.
About twenty five years ago, I attended the funeral for my grandfather Huntsman in Fillmore, Utah. It had been some years since I had visited this small, central Utah town.
You might receive these greetings if you stick your head into the classrooms of many Utah elementary schools. But you’ll also hear much more than “hello” in Mandarin, Portuguese, French, and Spanish.
IN THE PREFATORY SECTION of the Doctrine and Covenants, the Lord declared, “And the voice of warning shall be unto all people, by the mouths of my disciples, whom I have chosen in these last days” (D&C 1:4).
As part of a thirtieth-anniversary celebration that marks the year between these two founding events, we highlight on the following pages thirty alumni and friends—a small representation of the center’s broad and seemingly immeasurable global impact.
As part of a thirtieth-anniversary celebration that marks the year between these two founding events, we highlight on the following pages thirty alumni and friends—a small representation of the center’s broad and seemingly immeasurable global impact.
As part of a thirtieth-anniversary celebration that marks the year between these two founding events, we highlight on the following pages thirty alumni and friends—a small representation of the center’s broad and seemingly immeasurable global impact.
It’s too expensive! I can’t afford it!” This excuse, in one form or another, is among the top reasons that students give for not studying abroad.
I have been given an expiration date—a “best if enjoyed by” date. So I want to talk about a few things I have learned throughout the years, given as thirteen principles.
Not far from Hyde Park and Kensington Palace, 27 Palace Court has been called home by thousands of BYU students eager for a life-changing experience across the pond.
For several years now I have closely followed the work of the LDS International Society. As a General Authority coming from outside the United States, I have a special and passionate interest in the worldwide growth of the Church.
Originally a premed student, Huntsman intended to be a doctor or a lawyer, but an honors course called Greek Through the New Testament and a Pearl of Great Price class taught by Hugh Nibley developed within him a burning excitement for the ancient world, which eventually changed the course of his education and his career.
Old habits die hard, and as an international securities lawyer, I found myself simultaneously performing due diligence about you in preparing my remarks. I learned a little about your backgrounds, your studies, and your internships abroad.
The Asian studies coordinator at BYU’s Kennedy Center, Professor Eric Hyer also has a shared responsibility with the university’s greatest rival: the University of Utah. Hyer is one of two directors of the Intermountain Consortium for Asian and Pacific Studies (IMCAPS).
One thing is clear: we have frequent opportunities to better understand Asia from our perch in Provo. Consider this sampling of a few recent and notable Kennedy Center events...
Expatriate memoirs have glamorized international living since the days of sailing ships and far-flung empires. More recently, social media has brought a filter-tinted perspective that makes these lifestyles appear even more alluring.
On a normal day in McLeod Ganj, India, my host mom, Tam Kho, woke up at 6:00 a.m. to make balep—bread—for breakfast. By the time I woke up at 6:30, she was sitting on the floor of her tiny kitchen mixing flour, baking soda, and water with her hands...
It’s easy to imagine that most BYU students participate in educational programs abroad. After all, “the world is our campus”—at least it’s been on the sign that has welcomed everyone to BYU since the 1960s—and becoming globally competent seems to be a shared goal.
Going abroad is about much more than experiencing the joy—and difficulty—of travel, filling your Instagram feed with adventuring, or even doing your GE or major coursework in a different country.
On Friday night, on a corner just off Provo’s Center Street, you can hear the familiar Latin beat coming from a small restaurant that serves Dominican cuisine. El Tropical is a gathering place for great food, dancing, and karaoke, and at the end of each week, a crowd gathers to push the tables back and have a bit of fun.
From collaborating with the next county over to building relationships below the equator, BYU enjoys many partnerships that have greatly benefited the Latin American studies program.
When I was growing up, my father and I would listen to cassette-tape recordings of Alan Watts, the British popularizer of East Asian religions and a key figure of the 1960s counterculture movement.
Many students in international majors or minors start with an aspiration to be State Department diplomats or USAID workers. However, statistics reveal that, after they graduate, most of these students choose different paths.
Located along the Silk Road, Kazakhstan is a melting pot where the East and West once moved freely. Eventually becoming part of the Soviet Union, the country exhibits traces today of Middle Eastern, Western, Asian, and Soviet influences.
Historically, women’s voices have been missing. And while women compose almost 50 percent of the world’s population, studying women’s experiences and perspectives has only been acknowledged in academia since the 1970s.
I congratulate this society for its focus on both women in the world and Latter-day Saint women in the world. The work of the twenty-first century—both in the Church and in the wider community that Church members serve in—is changing and is adapting to change demographics, to change understanding, and to change perspectives.
A diplomacy career is often considered to be a single, lifetime trajectory. While that may be true for some, many join the Foreign Service as a second career and others leave it for new opportunities. We reached out to Kennedy Center alumni to learn how the Foreign Service has been a springboard to a different career—or, for some, a landing pad.
President Trump’s administration may well be judged almost entirely upon its handling of the coronavirus pandemic. As of this writing, it is too soon to tell what that judgment will be. In recent days we have certainly seen a more brusque relationship between China and the US as a result.
A consular-cone Foreign Service officer, Joey Leavitt, and his family braved ambiguous and ever-changing international immigration rules to travel from Dubai to Las Vegas in early April via London and Los Angeles. Leavitt rated and detailed their experience for us.
Over the past several years, BYU has been on a roll: more than twenty students each year have been selected for Internships with the US Department of State.
Why do most BYU students never intern or study abroad? Cost is a big issue. In 2018, we awarded seventy-two students from across campus a Global Opportunity Scholarship—a unique, needs-based award “of last resort” that helps them with the funds they cannot obtain elsewhere.
Using the same Argus C3 film camera, Taylor reshot the fifty-nine photos across Europe. He traveled to Amsterdam, Basel, Bavaria, Florence, London, Lugano, Munich, Paris, Rome, Vatican City, and Venice to create unique juxtapositions and updates on classic as well as lesser-known sites.
My interest in development began in high school, while I was working part-time in an organic supermarket. My coworkers and I would often discuss the issue of inequality, especially framed in terms of environmental sustainability, gender disparities, and international development efforts.
Before I moved to Washington, D.C., a friend of mine was worried that I would lose my idealism in the face of scoundrel politics. In fact, my frustrations with the government have decreased, while my frustrations with the NGO world have grown significantly.
Before I left for England, my father gave me a family group sheet with the names of four generations of my family who had lived in India. With the invaluable assistance and support of my thesis advisor, Dr. Paul Kerry, I spent four weeks reconstructing my family’s involvement in the British East India Company.
The question of poverty alleviation holds center stage for development theorists and practitioners around the world. They use cooperative, cottage industry, income-generation, microcredit, and macro development schemes to combat this global problem.
Many of us take for granted the fact that we were able to attend school close to home, or at least, in the same country as our loved ones. A few graduate students at the Kennedy Center are not so lucky, but they consider themselves blessed in other ways.
I remember those first days in India and how overwhelmed I felt. I was confused, tired, and unsure of what I had gotten myself into. The sights and smells were almost more than I could bear. Sure, I had been to Third World countries and lived abroad before, but this just seemed like more...
In November 2002, a BYU audiology team of four professors and four graduate students traveled to Hanoi, Vietnam. The eighteen-day medical mission was headed by Dr. David McPherson, chair of the Audiology and Speech Language Pathology Department.
When the Africa Project (as it came to be called among those working on it) first began, Chris and I had not even met. That was more than two years ago. Rawson came to BYU as a transfer student and business major, but he did not remain in business for long—his heart belonged to film.
As the U.S.-led war on terrorism gains momentum, three BYU students quietly work on the flank to counter terrorism in a very unique way. For the past two years Jason Monson, David Farmer, and I, Blaine Johnson, have been developing what is referred to as “substantive responses” to conditions that give rise to terrorism.
One of the main problems facing the developing world today is large and confining debt. A major obstacle to continued capital acquisition and future economic growth, debt burden is now one of the main concerns in international affairs.
The sun is rising over a small Guatemalan village as a young college student rolls out of her sleeping bag and helps her host mother prepare a simple breakfast over the fire. There is no electricity, and the younger children haul water from a nearby well.
Undergraduates often have an ideal view of how the world works. We assume after putting in four, long years of university study, possibly even working an on- or off-campus job, eager employers will be lining up waiting for the moment when we finally put on our caps and gowns. Rarely is that truly the case.
Among Xhosas (Ko-saws) in South Africa, storytelling is a magnificent art. Their stories are more than mere entertainment. Xhosa scholar Harold Scheub says storytelling for the Xhosa people is “not only a primary means of entertainment and artistic expression in the society, it is also the major educational device".
As we began our descent into a remote mountain valley, I yelled, “Is that it!?” straining to raise my voice above the roaring engine of our 1984 Soviet jeep, a sturdy veteran of the Russo-Afghan war that was built to go just about anywhere, although certainly not in comfort.
Antarctica, the vast icy desert that remains virtually untouched by humans, is the elusive seventh and least-visited continent on the face of the earth. It is the highest, driest, coldest, windiest, and emptiest place on earth.
Chihuahua, Mexico is home to the Tarahumara, an indigenous population with a culture rich in tradition that is struggling to maintain its unique identity, while taking advantage of educational opportunities offered by the dominant culture.
Well, no, it isn’t. Maybe you’re thinking about Magna. Malta is a small island in the Mediterranean Sea inhabited by about a half million people.
In Southeast Asia, specifically Vietnam, the introduction and widespread use of motorcycles is both a blessing and a curse. Throughout the last fifteen years, motorcycles have changed virtually every aspect of social life in Vietnam.
I don’t know what came over me in late 2003, but I suddenly had a strong urge to have an international experience, particularly in Africa. After a few clicks of the mouse on BYU’s International Study Programs web site, I discovered a medical anthropology field study program to Ghana, West Africa.
A month into my fieldwork in South Africa, a manager from the provincial Department of Social Development asked me, “Do we take off our development coats when we get home from work? Are we wearing development or is it inside us?”.
Aside from the classroom or my involvement with Students for International Development (SID), my first exposure to international development came as a leader of young American volunteer teams in Beira, Mozambique, Africa.
As each day goes by, our world continues to grow into a global community. We can no longer ignore what is going on in China, Africa, or even in the next state. The biggest challenge of globalization is its effect on the poor and uneducated.
My experience with USAID, as well as my past experiences working with various development organizations, has shaped much of what I know and how I currently view the field of development.
I got a phone call asking if I would be interested in an internship with the International Trade Center in Kyrgyzstan. I said yes, but to be honest, it wasn’t until I looked at a map that I found out where I was headed.
Working for Mondoro Company Limited proved to be extremely valuable to me academically, professionally, and spiritually.
Few things have had a stronger influence on my academic pursuits and career goals than my involvement with BYU’s Center for the Study of Europe (CSE). It all started while I was taking a political science course on the European Union from Professor Rebecca Larsen.
Students have an ever-increasing menu to consider when gaining publishing experience as undergraduates. Future teachers and anyone hoping to deepen their cross-cultural credentials may publish a CultureGuide, a teaching unit on a country they have lived in and studied.
Harindranto Rasolo, native of Madagascar, has lived a life full of diverse people, cultures, and experience. From this combination, he has learned the key to expanding our world does not lie in visiting as many countries as one can in a lifetime...
Living in a one-room shack with a tin roof and rotting wooden floors in Panama didn’t provide Maybelline Smithee many opportunities. When necessities like food and proper housing weren’t always available, a luxury like a formal college education was a mere dream and meeting with the Panamanian ambassador to the U.S. would have been unthinkable.
As forces pushed Vanessa Rothfels away from her travel hopes, determination to experience life out of Provo before her ever-looming graduation date arrived led her to discover the great variety of people and culture in Europe.
Dario Espinoza left his home in Guadalajara, Mexico, to learn English at the English Learning Center (ELC) and realized quickly that language holds the key to understanding, because without understanding what people around you are trying to communicate—whether by words or other means—one cannot get far in life.
James Crookston felt that in order to understand the people and culture he was studying he had to reach outside his textbooks and discover what aspects set Europe apart from the rest of the world.
From Spanish to Arabic to English, Raage Sofe has long been interested in the study of languages. However, he also came to realize his love of language extended beyond linguistics to the culture, people, politics, and traditions of countries.
Thomas Nance stepped up as the “man of the house” when his father left to serve with the Army Reserve in Iraq during Nance’s senior year of high school. As the only child left at home, he felt the need to take care of his mother and prepare more carefully for a future career and adult life.
As a recipient of both a Boren and a Fulbright award, Annie Samhouri hopes to seek employment with USAID in the Office of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment or with the United Nations.
Growing up in a small farming community in central Washington state, I did not have any international experiences—not even a visit to Canada. And although I met people from other countries while serving in the Texas Houston Mission, that did not equate to an international experience.
When a coworker told Daehyeon Kim about an international internship she would be doing during the summer, Kim was intrigued. The coworker pointed Kim, an economics major and a Japanese minor, in the direction of the Kennedy Center.
While walking by the Joseph F. Smith Building his sophomore year, Chris Johns noticed a poster for an internship program in New York.
Sydney Outzen remembers watching her dad read the Washington Post every night after he returned home from work. Outzen would usually read the comics over her bowl of cereal, but eventually she began to glance through the rest of the newspaper. And her international curiosity grew.
Thanks to the Kennedy Center’s most recent initiative, Provo Parity, and donors who gave to the program, six students received a Global Opportunity Scholarship in 2015, allowing them to have an international experience that they otherwise couldn’t have had.
Benjamin Cuque, a dance major at Brigham Young University, would not hesitate to say that his China dance study abroad in spring 2016 transformed him.
In May 2016 Robert Swasey jumped at the chance to combine two loves: engineering and languages. An engineering student at BYU with a passion for foreign languages and cultures...
Alex Harper will spend a semester in direct-enrollment classes in Nanjing, China, and participate in an internship with a Nanjing-based news outlet as part of BYU’s Chinese Flagship Program—all thanks to a Boren Scholarship.
Zachary N. Larsen, a recipient of the Boren Scholarship coordinated through the Kennedy Center, has been learning Mandarin Chinese since September 2012. It all started when he was awarded an Air Force ROTC scholarship to study Chinese at BYU...
The “scholarship of last resort” is starting to get noticed across campus, and the number of benefiting students continues to grow—totaling 72 in 2017—thanks to support from alumni and friends.
Pratt, a Latin American studies major, recently interned near the city of Granada as the first volunteer intern for Vivifica Nica, a nonprofit organization that provides service opportunities in Nicaragua for university students.
