We are pleased to announce that this year’s recipient of the Sandra Rogers Endowed Scholarship for Kennedy Scholars has been chosen. This scholarship honors Sandra Rogers, who served as International Vice President of BYU from 2001 to 2021. It is an extension of the Kennedy Scholar award, which provides funding to BYU students who embody the aims of the Kennedy Center for International Studies: as the applicants are considered, one stand-out student is chosen to receive a generous stipend to cover tuition and books.
Recipients must be a Kennedy Center major and have an international focus. The recipient for the coming year is Kelsey Powell, an Asian Studies major who is minoring in Chinese and Music.
This Year’s Recipient
Powell was an International Relations major at one point, but decided she was more interested in history, culture, and language than she was in political science and economics. Switching to Asian Studies came from a lifetime of interest in Asia, she says: “My interest in East Asia comes partially from years of being obsessed with it as a kid, but also from a high school study abroad I did living in Taiwan for a year. That experience expanded my personal world and narrowed my academic focus. Now, through my studies I want to understand the complex social and political dynamics of East Asia, especially between China and Taiwan, so that I can be of help somehow improving relations between the U.S. and this part of the world in the future.”
In both of her majors, she had opportunities to get involved at the Kennedy Center. She’s presented at the Asian Studies Student Symposium, which is put on by the program every year, and volunteered with the student leadership for the BYU China Conference. “I am also a member of the Society for International Studies,” she adds, “and participated in a BYU study abroad to National Chung Hsing University last summer on a language-learning and internship program.”
Powell hopes to attend graduate school and someday join the U.S. Foreign Service. To prepare for that future, she recently presented research at the Salt Lake Community College Asia Conference, talking about Mazu worship in southern China and how it functioned as a form of social governance during the late Qing dynasty; she plans to submit her research paper to the BYU Asian Studies Student Journal as well.
As part of her pursuit of the Foreign Service, she recently took the second of three rounds of testing for the Foreign Service Officer Test. She says, “I plan to keep taking the test each year until I manage to get in, since becoming a Foreign Service Officer is one of my dreams. When I get in one day, my Mandarin language skills and the cultural literacy that I have gained as a Kennedy Center student will give me a critical vantage point from which I can build bridges of understanding and cooperation between the United States and parts of Asia.”
As getting into the Foreign Service can take some time, she’s also looking into other ways to apply her Asian Studies background to a career in the meantime, such as, she says, “working for the Church’s charity international organizations, facilitating study abroad and other international educational opportunities, and providing policy makers with research into vital cross-cultural issues in order to help them make educated and culturally sensitive decisions.”
Receiving the Scholarship
Last year, Powell applied to be a Kennedy Scholar, along with many other scholarships, because, as she says, “That’s all I have to rely on for my education right now.”
The Kennedy Scholar committee was impressed with her application and chose her for the prestigious Sandra Rogers scholarship. “You can imagine my surprise and relief at finding out I had been awarded it,” she says, “especially with the looming cost of having to pay for my final year of college by myself. I guess you never know until you try. Getting a scholarship like this makes all the difference for my education (it simply would be impossible without it, financially speaking), especially since this is my last year at BYU before graduation, so I feel both grateful and honored to have been awarded it.”
Having her tuition covered, plus receiving an additional stipend, frees Powell up to focus on her final year and her plans for the future, including completing the Foreign Service Officer Test.
“My hope is that with these efforts, I will leave a positive mark on the world and leave it better than I found it,” she says, “and this scholarship will make it possible for me to continue my education toward these goals.”