 The Boran Fellowship is a grant for national security and strategic language learning that the Department of Defense funds. They define national security broadly, so it includes things like diplomacy, development, which is how my project fits into that, and also strategic language learning is for languages that are not traditionally taught in school. Also, things like Urdu, Swahili, Mandarin, Turkish are all included in that because they're all languages that are also spoken in areas of critical importance to American foreign affairs. If you look at it in the grand scheme of national security, it's a little bit confusing. Why would a country's food security be critical to the U.S.? Well, the reality is that most riots and wars and all these things throughout time happen because people are poor and people are hungry and they want food and food security contributes to stability in nations and allows governments to maintain trust with their populations and healthier populations that can contribute to the workforce because in Kenya we see supply chains that are weakened by lack of financial access to climate controlled storage or other good agronomic practices and if we can find more affordable ways to do this then we can make food safer and not waste food and then feed populations more easily. So I'm a master's student in biological engineering and my research specifically focuses on extrusion processing to rid of aflatoxin and also to improve nutritional quality. So I'll be doing some sort of a work of farmers in Kenya and looking at their storage practices and how that relates to aflatoxin contamination and critical grains and other crops like peanuts and then using that data to run tests and then ultimately all this data will contribute to my master's thesis. They're really looking for engineers and scientists to contribute to government affairs and to international affairs in the U.S. because so often people feel like those positions are reserved for students that are in political science or economic backgrounds but actually they want people that have technical knowledge and critical thinking skills. So I think that definitely was very helpful for me in the application. I would also say I've had some more unconventional experiences compared to the average engineering student. Working with Land O'Lakes was a huge thing for me in their global food security internship program. The research that I've done thus far on projects like the Purdue Utility Project, working with farmers abroad and also on USAID grants. Those two things combined, the unconventional experiences and then the STEM really helped me. For pursuing opportunities, Purdue is fantastic. There's everything and anything that you could want to do and tailoring, you know, you have your degree as like a baseline and then using that degree to kind of fashion your interests, particularly for students that are interested in using their engineering degree to help people. We've got the grand engineering challenges and professors across campus working on these things, energy, sustainability, you name it. So there's that and you can pursue that through epics, through research, through classwork, through internships but then also I would say I've had a lot of mentorship and guidance support too, not only from faculty members but also from staff. In the NISO, the National and International Scholarships Office, I spent two months working with them and my advisors and my recommendation writers to work on my application which I would not have been able to know like certain language pieces that were critical in the application without their help. So that was really great for a student that hadn't applied for a fellowship like this before. I think my first recommendation would be start early, don't put off the application, you know, don't give yourself a week to do it but also I would say that I felt like applying for a fellowship like this or the Fulbright was kind of like getting into Harvard, right? Like it just was like okay I'm smart but I'm not, that just seems unattainable but it's really not and there are so many people that are supporting you and people that want to see you succeed and that includes here at Purdue and also in these fellowship committees that are looking for people like you, like STEM engineers and that you should know that when you're applying because otherwise it can feel discouraging, you're like oh I won't get it it's only a X number percentage acceptance rate, forget about that, like you have a great case like even just going to Purdue gives you like an advantage so to not discredit that would be my next piece of advice. I actually had a conversation with my friend about this the other day because my Swahili is pretty much zero and she and I agreed that my goal should be when I'm taking my taxi back to the airport at the end of the trip that I can talk to my cab driver in Swahili that like have a basic conversation. So that's like my language goals I think to go from zero to that. And then I would also say that culturally I've been to Kenya before but living there long term and working with people long term is going to be different, might be challenging but also I think it's going to give me a lot of insight into my own like culture and how I work with other people and how to be productive in this kind of global setting and research that is with multi-national teams. And then also just the fun things about living in Kenya too, I mean, Kenyan weddings, I've already been invited to one. And you know spending Christmas there and New Year's it will be different and really cool to experience. I do believe that today we're global citizens and we can't discount the choices that we make even in our small town in Indiana have sometimes international consequences. I mean if you look at what's happening in the rainforest or even the Nutella that you eat, palm oil production, things like that we have to think more on a global scale and also because of that people that live across the globe are now our neighbors. And I think I believe in the good of common humanity to help one another and I think I can do that with my engineering degree. So that's why it's important to me.