On Thanksgiving Day, Laura Bate undoubtedly will devour a piece of pumpkin pie. It was one of the things she missed while studying in Cairo during the 2008-09 academic year.
The fifth-year senior, majoring in both international affairs and economics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, also missed clean air, open space, her friends and the communities she has become a part of at CU-Boulder. But Bate gladly immersed herself in Cairo's academic and cultural experiences while studying at the American University, and she traded her love of pumpkin pie for her newfound favorite Egyptian food called koshary: a layered dish of spaghetti, macaroni, rice, black lentils, chick peas, spicy tomato sauce and garlic sauce.
Bate says her focus on Arabic was instrumental in leading her to choose a study abroad program in the Middle East and in being awarded the David L. Boren Scholarship, one of the most competitive and coveted national scholarships for undergraduate international study. Boren recipients receive up to $10,000 for a semester abroad and up to $20,000 for a year abroad. In return, they commit to working for the federal government for at least one year upon graduation.
"There's a lot of need for people who study any of the critical languages including Russian, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Farsi and Urdu," said Bate. "These languages are not understood nearly as well as they need to be for a lot of involvement both on the government and even corporate level abroad."
Bate's skills in Arabic reached the intermediate level during her time in Cairo and will carry over to the job search she will conduct as her May 2010 graduation from CU-Boulder nears.
"Right now I'm planning on applying to everything I can get my hands on, and then looking at the options and seeing where I go from there," said Bate. "Ideally, I'd like to end up with the State Department, so the Foreign Service exam is in my future."
Bate also took courses taught in English including Contemporary History of the Middle East, Ritual and Purity in Islam, International Organizations and Islamic History.
Through a combination of academic and extracurricular experiences abroad, Bate says she came away with overarching perspectives on cross-cultural challenges.
One of the adjustments Bate had to make came with living in an Egyptian residence hall, which was operated under Islamic religious customs. The dorm had strict rules on keeping men and women separate. Also, Bate, a fan of poker, was forbidden from playing cards.
"Sometimes my motivating desires, wants, needs and understandings aren't the same as those around me and so it becomes an intricate web of figuring out what baselines people are coming from and simply accepting that they're not going to be the same, which is impressively hard to do," she said.
Bate's study abroad experience and return to the United States shifted the list of things she misses from longings of home to longings of abroad.
"I miss that every day was a challenge," said Bate. "Every day there is always something new to think about, there's always, 聭Well, why is that happening and how does that work and how do I make this happen?' Every day becomes a puzzle to be solved."
For more information on study abroad visit the CU-Boulder Office of International Education Web site at /.