GLOA Senior Hannah Cole Receives Boren Fellowship

GLOA Senior Hannah Cole Receives Boren Fellowship

Hannah Cole is a recipient of the 2019-2020 NSEP David L. Boren Fellowship. She intends to fulfil her fellowship by spending six months in Seoul, South Korea at Sogang University taking language courses while also completing research at George Mason Korea's Center for Security and Policy Studies with Dr. Soyoung Kwon. After completing her master's degree, Hannah will fulfill the service requirement through a position at the Department of Defense.  

After graduating high school in South Korea, Hannah knew she wanted to pursue a degree in East Asian Affairs. With both the campus in Songdo, South Korea and local proximity to Washington, D.C., George Mason was the obvious choice. Through internships at the State Department and Brookings Institution, Hannah was able to build her professional expertise. As a lifelong lover of languages, Hannah took three opportunities to study abroad to complete her language requirements at GMU - once in Taiwan for Mandarin, and twice in South Korea for Korean. 

Hannah's second trip to Korea was funded by the Critical Language Scholarship, a two-month long intensive language study sponsored by the State Department. It was after the completion of this program, and a two-level language skill increase, that Hannah decided she wanted to apply to Boren in order to pursue a longer program to develop her skills. The Boren Fellowship's National Security focus is important to Hannah because of her background as an "Army-Brat" and her aspiration to one day see a peaceful reunification of the Korean peninsula. 

After completing her fellowship in South Korea, Hannah will pursue a Master's of Asian Studies with a focus on US-Korean Relations at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.