Smith School Senior Receives Two Major International Awards

Smith School senior Rebecca Hammer has been presented with two opportunities of a lifetime. Hammer, a finance and economics double major and Chinese language minor, was awarded two major international awards: a Fulbright Award to teach English in Taiwan and a Boren Scholarship to study Chinese intensively, either in the People’s Republic or Taiwan.

She is accepting the Boren Scholarship, which, according to the National Scholarship Office at the University of Maryland, is a highly competitive Department of Defense award with a 15 percent acceptance rate. The scholarship provides up to $20,000 to U.S. undergraduate students to pursue intensive language studies in areas of the world that are critical to U.S. interests.

Hammer is one of six students at the university to be offered a Boren Scholarship for the 2011 - 2012 academic year and is the fourth Smith School student or alumna to be offered a Fulbright Award for 2011 - 2012.

“It was easy for me to choose which award to accept because I knew as an end goal I wanted to achieve fluency so I can use the language in my everyday job,” Hammer explained. “With the Fulbright, I was honored to receive the award, but I knew it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do because it is only out of Taiwan.”

She started studying Chinese her freshman year at the university as a way to stray from only taking classes within her majors: “I was taking a lot of economics and business classes, along with math classes because I thought I was going to minor in math. But, I knew I really wanted to travel and to see the world, so I decided to start taking Chinese.”

“I figured I could eventually look for jobs in Europe because China does business with everybody and everybody does business with China,” she explained. “Also, my dad’s best friend is Chinese and pushed me to think about studying the language.”

Hammer, who just completed an internship at the Bureau of Economic Analysis in Washington, D.C., has already spent two summers in China, first studying language in Beijing, then volunteering as a teaching assistant in the rural village of Changjiang in southwest China.

Right now, her Chinese language skills are “at the level where it is fun, but not useful for everything.” She knew that an intensive program would really help her achieve fluency.

“I knew that was what I wanted to do – I knew it would be rough,” she said. “Intensive programs are true to their name. They are four hours of class each day followed by four to five hours of studying each night to prepare for class the next day. It’s a lot of studying, studying, studying – with a little time in between semesters to travel.”

The Boren Scholarship also has a service component to it, requiring all recipients to work for the U.S. government for at least one year when they get back: “They really push people toward the CIA, DOD or the State Department. I might want to do diplomatic relations, but I’m really more of an economics person and hopefully would be able to use the economics degree.”

Applying for the Boren Scholarship was a very involved process, Hammer recalled. She had to get multiple recommendations, write two essays – one about why she thought she would be a good fit for the scholarship and another about what she wanted to do within the government with her language knowledge – and select which two programs she would be interested and explain why they would be the best for her.

“Without a doubt, Francis DuVinage is the best resource I’ve even been offered while at the University of Maryland,” Hammer said of the director at the National Scholarships Office and Maryland Center for Undergraduate Research. “He is an amazing person and starts you working on every single draft early. He was just amazing. My essays look nothing like what I turned in at the beginning – we went through revision after revision. He knows exactly what they are looking for and was a huge help.”

Upon completing her Boren Scholarship she hopes to enroll in an MA program in international affairs to prepare for work that will combine her interests in financial and economic affairs and China.