Former START intern Patrick Niceforo recently returned from a semester studying Korean at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, thanks to a nationally competitive Boren Scholarship. Having studied there in 2013, he already had a sense of the program’s structure and was able to dive right into his courses. And though the coursework provided important lessons – after all, Yonsei ranks among South Korea’s best schools – it was the cultural exchange that taught him the most.
“College is a great space for meeting students with diverse backgrounds, but studying abroad allows one to be truly immersed in a new culture,” Niceforo said. “It gave me a more informed international perspective with which to view and dissect global issues.”
That perspective is crucial in his current studies and work as a graduate student at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey in the International Policy and Development program. After graduation, he intends to pursue a career with the State Department.
“Going abroad helped focus my career goals around international federal service,” he said.
He said the opportunities he had in South Korea also helped him appreciate how language and culture intersect, and taught him things that even years of classroom learning could not.
“One thing a foreign language student might not receive at home is exposure to different accents or dialects of a language,” Niceforo said. “Indeed a student who only studies Korean at a university in the United States will probably not become accustomed to colloquial speech. Compounded by regional slang and generational differences, living abroad helped me better understand how language and culture are very fluid and dynamic concepts.”