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Summer 2009
Student Profile: Boren Fellowship winner, Russ Burns
Russ Burns grew up in Banner Elk, a small town in North Carolina, and he went to college about 75 miles away. But since earning his bachelor's degree from Davidson College, Mr. Burns has traveled to Jordan to study Arabic, and now, with the help of a Boren Fellowship, he is bound for Syria this August to study economic reform and foreign policy in that country.
Mr. Burns, a master's student in the Elliott School's Middle East studies program, has worked as a paralegal at a corporate law firm, and works part time as a research assistant at the U.S. Institute of Peace while studying full time at the Elliott School. He says he chose the Elliott School for his studies because it offered "substantive depth" in his two greatest areas of interest: modern politics and Middle East history, and international relations theory.
"I also liked that the program was new and would start out with a small cohort while also having great faculty members," he said of the Middle East studies master's program.
After attending a presentation on campus last fall of the National Security Education Program, which funds Boren Fellowships, Mr. Burns decided to apply for a Boren fellowship. According to the NSEP site, the fellowships help undergraduate and graduate students at U.S. institutions "add an important international and language component to their educations," particularly in regions that are "underrepresented in study abroad."
In Syria, Mr. Burns intends to focus on strengthening his Arabic, which he calls "the perfect complement to the M.A. program." His research project on Syrian reform and foreign policy, which is also funded by the Boren, draws from research he conducted at the Elliott School with classmate Rhea Myerscough for a capstone project.
Upon returning to Washington after the 10 months, Mr. Burns will, according to Boren stipulations, fulfill a service requirement with a U.S. agency. "I wanted to use my master's degree to work in U.S. foreign policy anyway."