International Relations Major Awarded College Hood

The International Relations Department is proud to announce that Arabella Abad, an undergraduate student within our department, has been awarded the LCA College Hood. This award is granted to the most outstanding or students within the college. This is the second time in as many years that a student from the International Relations Department has been awarded this honor.

Abad's bio, as written by SFSU Strategic Marketing and Communications, is as follows:

Arabella Abad embodies the spirit of multilingualism and multiculturalism like few others. Fluent in three languages, Abad has demonstrated an exceptional enthusiasm for language learning and cultural immersion. 

Born to Filipino parents, she spent part of her youth living in Germany and Korea. These experiences shaped her global outlook at an early age. At SFSU, Abad pursued a triple major in International Relations, German and Chinese. In 2021, she was admitted to the highly selective SFSU Chinese Flagship Program, a federally funded honors track for intensive Chinese learning. In 2022, she received the Critical Language Scholarship from the U.S. State Department, enabling her to study Chinese at Dalian University of Technology in China. 

Following this, Abad studied for a semester at Heidelberg University in Germany, studying International Relations and advanced Chinese simultaneously. In 2023, she earned another distinguished honor, the Boren Scholarship, funding her participation in a year-long capstone program at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. Additionally, she received the Benny and May Chin Scholarship in International Relations and was recently inducted into Phi Sigma Iota, America’s oldest foreign-language honors society. 

Abad has deeply impressed her professors, no matter which language she spoke with them. Her long-term goal is to attend graduate school and pursue a career either in international education or diplomacy.

Congratulations, Arabella!