Zoe Bouras ’18 has been awarded the 2018 Technos International Prize, an annual award recognizing a student who has excelled academically and has contributed to broadening international awareness and understanding. The award is presented through the Tanaka Ikueikai Educational Trust in Japan and was created to improve international relations.
A double major in international studies and political science, Bouras has extensive experiences interning and studying abroad. A European immigrant herself from Sunderland, England, Bouras said her interest in global awareness stemmed from her experience as a high school freshman, where she spent the year as a Rotary exchange student in Arequipa, Peru, and later returned to partake in an ESL Internship at Dunalastair Colegio Europeo. Since then, she has traveled to 25 countries, developing her ESL skills and broadening her global perspective through the opportunities offered at Illinois Wesleyan.
Selected as a 2016 IWU Freeman Asia Intern, Bouras spent eight weeks at the Institute of East and West Studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, where she further developed her ESL and marketing skills and conducted research on refugee flows from Pyeongchang, South Korea. Following this experience, Bouras studied politics, philosophy and economics as a junior at the University of Oxford through the IWU Pembroke program, an experience which “greatly enriched” her international studies education. In addition to these opportunities, Bouras, who is half Greek, spent a summer in Greece learning the language.
Bouras’ experiences abroad influenced her political science senior seminar project which involved researching anti-elite sentiment in individuals across 21 European nations. A member of Pi Sigma Alpha (PSA), the national political science honor society, Bouras shared her findings on this phenomena at the PSA National Research Conference at George Washington University in Washington D.C. in February.
Bouras will continue applying her international experience as she pursues her master’s degree in Latin American Studies at Oxford University in the fall.
Congratulations, Zoe!
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