Bridges Alumni Magazine

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.

Quinn Mecham on why interdisciplinary degrees make sense—plus his ideas on traveling smarter after seeing 100+ countries.

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.

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.

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.

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.