Left to right: Mason students Waleska Solorzano, Gabrielle Jackson, Brooke Finnicum and Tovah Siegel accepted their Boren Awards, which give undergraduate and graduate students the chance to develop their language skills in areas of the world deemed critical to American security.
Five George Mason University students will get the chance to do their part to make the world a better place, and they can list fluency in languages other than English as the reason why.
Brooke Finnicum, Gabrielle Jackson, Waleska Solorzano, Tovah Siegel and Danielle Melton have all received prestigious Boren Awards to undertake intense study abroad. Finnicum and Jackson are among the latest recipients of the Boren Scholarship that provides up to $20,000 for undergraduates, while Solorzano and Siegel were each awarded the Boren Fellowship that provides as much as $30,000 to graduate students. Melton was also awarded the Boren Scholarship, but the Phi Beta Kappa member has declined the award to attend Harvard.
The Boren Scholarships and Fellowships are collectively known as the Boren Awards and give both undergraduate and graduate students the chance to develop their language and international skills in areas of the world that have been deemed critical to America's security.
“The Boren Scholarship supports long-term study of critical languages abroad,” said LaNitra Berger, the director of Office Fellowships for Mason’s Honors College. “The program is highly selective, so it is a significant accomplishment that three Mason undergraduates received this award. Their selection not only speaks to their hard work and perseverance, but also to Mason's long-standing commitment to producing globally engaged graduates who are prepared to act.”
Sponsored by the National Security Education Program, the awards are part of a major federal initiative to increase the number of U.S. citizens with critical foreign language and international skills. All Boren Award winners agree to work for the federal government for at least a year.
Finnicum, a senior communication major with a concentration in public relations and minors in both Korean studies and tourism and events management, will graduate this month before returning to Korea to continue her studies of that country’s language.
“I’ve had a longtime interest in Korean language and culture,” she said, starting in high school with a trip to Korea through the State Department’s National Security Language Initiative for Youth Scholarship. As a college freshman, Finnicum spent a semester at the Mason Korea Campus in Songdo. As a junior, she spent a semester at Korea University in Seoul.
“Even though I have studied abroad in Korea before, the Boren Scholarship will make it possible for me to return to South Korea and gain a high-level proficiency in the language,” Finnicum said. “It is a life-changing opportunity and hopefully a stepping-stone into the field of diplomacy as a liaison between the U.S. and Korea.”
Jackson is a sophomore community health major and Spanish minor who returns to the United States on May 18 after spending the spring studying abroad in Madrid, Spain. She’ll have less than a month before heading to Sao Paulo, Brazil, in her first trip to South America to begin studying Portuguese and immersing herself in Latin America and the Afro-Latino populations there. Both Jackson and Melton are Honors College students.
“This is truly a great honor,” said Jackson, who was Mason’s first winner of the Boren Summer STEM award. “I’m looking at it as another opportunity to expand my worldview.”
Solorzano, a philosophy major who will also graduate May 18, previously studied abroad in Bulgaria. She’ll delay the start of her pursuit of a master’s in philosophy at Mason to study Indonesian and participate in Boren’s Indonesian Flagship Language Institute, a special intensive summer program in the United States that will be followed by immersive overseas study in Indonesia.
Solorzano works for Polaris, a Washington, D.C.-based anti-human trafficking nonprofit, so she hopes to further explore human rights and gender as they pertain to human trafficking and sexual exploitation in Indonesia.
“Indonesia is a major source—as well as a destination and transit country—for women, men and children subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking,” she said. “Indonesian victims have been identified in other Asian and Middle Eastern countries as well as in the Pacific Islands, Africa, Europe and North America.”
Siegel, a PhD student in environmental science and policy, will be studying Portuguese in Brazil while working on a better understanding of forest fragmentation of the Brazilian Amazon and a national security argument connecting the importance of fragmentation research to preventing the spread of infectious diseases to the United States.
“The Boren Fellowship is an unbelievable opportunity to pursue my doctoral research while immersing myself in a new language and culture,” Siegel said. “This fellowship will provide the foundation for my graduate studies and future career in conservation, while visiting a region of the world I plan to dedicate most of my life to.”