David L. Boren Awards for International Study

Written by Michael Kuzma, 2003 Boren Scholar and 2008 Boren Fellow

After two years of college football, it became apparent that I would never make it to the NFL. Luckily, I had good grades and aspirations of becoming a lawyer.  While taking an introductory Japanese course at Nebraska Wesleyan University, a woman from my school’s international office came and told us about scholarships to Japan.  Boren was one of the scholarships introduced.  This perked my intellectual curiosity about the economic relationship between the United States and Japan in the agricultural context, as well as the more complicated aspects of the Japanese language.  Prior to this, I had never lived outside of Nebraska and knew virtually nothing about Japan, other than that it bought lots of Nebraskan farm products.  This was about to change.

Before going abroad, I spoke, at best, rudimentary Japanese.  My first two months abroad at Kwansei Gakuin University (“KGU”) in Osaka were very challenging and I felt like I had no knack for Japanese.  However, my concerns went away when a stroke of luck landed me in the perfect position to learn Japanese: my former college linebacker frame caught the eye of the KGU sumo club.  They recruited me and I joined.  Suddenly, there was no choice but to learn proper Japanese under the threat of corporeal punishment. 

For my first months at KGU, I lived with a host family.  But after joining the sumo team, I left my home stay and moved into the sumo KGU’s stable, where I lived with the team.  Little did I know I had just dove, head first, into an intense, highly-structured life that I had not expected.  It was the best experience of my life.  In addition to studying the Japanese language intensively, I sought a course load that would broaden my knowledge of the country and its people by taking courses in Japanese history, politics, geography, and law.  By the end of my year at KGU my time spent in and out of the classroom had paid off; I had not only caught up with my classmates, but surpassed them.  I received the honor of delivering the commencement speech at the exchange students’ graduation ceremony.   

After two years on the JET Program and two more years in law school at my native University of Nebraska, I received a graduate Boren Fellowship for the 2008-2009 academic year.  As a Fellow, I studied international business law at Temple University Beasley College of Law in Tokyo.  Law school is hard; law school in Japanese is really hard.  But after spending a year doing sumo, I knew I could handle the academic rigor.  Having lost all of my sumo weight, I spent my free time helping the men at the Nebraska Economic Development Center in Tokyo.  It was a very rewarding experience.  However, most people involved in the Nebraska Center are senior business people, many over 65 years old.  Since I ended up spending a lot of my free time with them, I developed a “special” type of Japanese commonly used by businessmen of that generation.  This business Japanese is a great compliment to the Osaka accent I developed while studying at KGU.  My Japanese now stands in stark contrast to the Japanese spoken by people closer to my age.  Starting with a proficiency level of novice-mid prior to my Boren Scholarship, I scored an advanced-low when I returned from my Boren Fellowship.

Since I would like to join the Foreign Service, I hope that the experiences gained with Boren funding have given me the skills, analytical, linguistic and interpersonal, necessary to succeed in the State Department.  Thanks to guidance from Boren alumni and staff, I’ve applied for the Presidential Management Fellows Program and will apply for the Diplomacy Fellows Program next year with the goal of joining the hundreds of other Boren alumni who have successfully found employment with the federal government.