Karen Laska

Karen Laska, a member of the Honors College from Wheeling, will graduate with degrees in international studies, Slavic and East European studies, and world languages (French) and a minor in history. She is a member of Pi Delta Phi, WVU UNICEF Club, WVU Oxfam and WVU Russian and Eastern European Club.

She has maintained a 4.0 while traveling the world, volunteering her time to fighting food insecurity, serving as a tutor and instructor with English as a Second Language and Literacy Volunteers for Monongalia and Preston Counties, an ESL conversation partner with the WVU Intensive English Program and student worker with WVU World Languages Department.

Laska had every intention of becoming a journalist, but a service-learning component of Journalism 101 that led her the Literacy Volunteers for Monongalia and Preston Counties changed the trajectory of her future. There, she discovered her passion for teaching English and desire for a career in public diplomacy.

In 2016, she served as a summer intern in the U.S. Department of State Office of the Chief of Protocol in Washington, D.C., where she helped to strengthen partnerships between the federal government and the diplomatic community.

And in 2017 she served as public affairs intern in the U.S. Consulate General in Krakow, where she worked alongside Foreign Service officers to advance U.S.- bilateral relationships by conducting community outreach and managing cultural educational programs. Later that year, she returned as a Boren Scholar to study the Polish language and culture at Jagiellonian University.

Laska has had several other opportunities to study abroad. In 2015, she traveled to Strasbourg, France, to study European Union institutions and legal systems, and in 2016, she traveled with the Honors College to the Royal University for Women in Bahrain where she participated in a televised debate on women in leadership.

She also spent the 2017 spring semester studying at the Université Grenoble Alpes where she focused on improving her knowledge of the French language and culture.

The experienced globetrotter began her travel abroad in 2105 as a student delegate at The European International Model United Nations at The Hague in the Netherlands.

Laska is a Boren and Fulbright Scholar, and a 2018 semi-finalist for the George J. Mitchell Scholarship.

After graduation, she will complete a summer traineeship in the Press and Public Diplomacy section of the Delegation of the European Union to the United States in Washington, D.C.

As a Fulbright Scholar, she will travel to the Slovak Republic in the fall to spend a year working as an English teaching assistant.