Grand Valley State University students Meagan Roche and Matt Brainovich have been awarded prestigious Boren Scholarships to study a foreign language in another country for the 2012-13 academic year.
The selection process for the Boren Awards is rigorous. For the third consecutive year, the Institute of International Education, which administers the awards on behalf of National Security Education Program, received a record number of applications for both the undergraduate Boren Scholarship and the graduate Boren Fellowship. This year, 1,014 undergraduate students applied for the Boren Scholarship and 161 were awarded, while 575 graduate students applied for the Boren Fellowship and 119 were awarded.
Roche, an anthropology major from Howell, will study Wolof, the language spoken in parts of Africa, at the West African Resource Center in Senegal. Brainovich, an international relations major from Rochester, will study Russian at Novosibirsk State University in Russia.
Another Grand Valley student, Shawn Wooster, an international relations and Germanic languages and literatures major from Jackson, was named an alternate, which means he will receive Boren Scholarship funding to study Romanian at Babes-Bolyai University in Romania if another student in the program can no longer attend.
“We are very proud of these students and excited for the opportunities that await them,” said Amanda Cuevas, director of the Frederik Meijer Office of Fellowships at Grand Valley. “The Boren Scholarships are extremely competitive and the fact that we have two recipients and an alternate this award cycle demonstrates the high caliber of scholarly accomplishment these students have achieved at Grand Valley and on a national level.”
