Audrey Keranen '12 of Iowa City, Iowa, has been named a 2011 Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs fellow. Keranen is one of 20 Pickering undergraduate fellows this year.

Administered by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and funded by the U.S. Department of State, the fellowships will provide support for her completion of her undergraduate degree and a graduate degree as she prepares academically and professionally to enter the U.S. Foreign Service.

Keranen, a rising senior with a double major in government and in China and Asia-Pacific studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, says her "main academic interests include contemporary U.S.-China relations, China's government and bureaucracy, and modern Chinese identity." She is studying Mandarin this summer in Shanghai on a Critical Language Scholarship sponsored by the State Department, previously participated in Cornell-in-Washington and will study at Beijing University this fall.

At Cornell, she has been an active volunteer for Teach for China (Teach for America's sister organization in China), and worked part time at the Center for International Studies and the East Asia Program. With the fellowship, she is obligated to complete her master's degree in international affairs.

"I hope to pursue a career in the political or public diplomacy cone of the Foreign Service, and hope to be assigned to desks in East Asia," Keranen wrote in an email from China. "It is my long-term goal to make a positive, indelible impression upon U.S.-China relations, especially."

Fellows also participate in one domestic and one overseas internship. They commit to three years of service as a Foreign Service officer for the U.S. Department of State, contingent on their passing the Foreign Service examinations.