A Lafayette First

Steve Berube’s ’17 (Shrewsbury, Mass.) passion for Central Asia brought Lafayette a one-of-a-kind honor this spring. He is the College’s first recipient of a coveted Boren Scholarship.

Sponsored by the National Security Education Program, the Boren is a federal initiative designed to deepen the pool of U.S. citizens with foreign language and international skills. In exchange for scholarship funding, Boren award recipients agree to work in the federal government for a period of at least one year.

Berube, who has taken interim trips to Tanzania and Russia, will use the funds to help defray the cost of studying the Russian language for eight weeks among the snowcapped peaks of the
Tian Shan Mountains. He will live in Almaty, Kazakhstan, for the summer.