IR Major Eduardo Gonzalez Selected as Hood Recipient for College of Liberal & Creative Arts

Eduardo Gonzalez is first of his immigrant family from Mexico to attend and complete college; his father works as a gardener in Los Angeles, his mother is a homemaker, both encouraged him to get a good education and better himself.  Inherently curious, disciplined, and determined, Eduardo enrolled at SF State in both Political Science and International Relations -- in response to current events, he chose Middle East and Islamic Studies as a minor and regional focus, and took the opportunity of studying a year abroad at Koc University in Istanbul, Turkey.

Interested in refugees and migrants as well as minority issues within the Middle East, in particular issues of members of the LGTB community, he took classes in social movements, ethnicities, and nationalism. He also signed up for quantitative, statistical analysis courses in order to do the numbers on the issues. A summer graduate-school preparation course at UC Berkeley also helped him hone his quantitive skills.

His research has already yielded papers of high quality, presented at national conferences and published in the Journal of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania.  Eduardo earned recognitions and awards on campus, winning the Middle East and Islamic Studies Excellence Award, the nomination for Phi Beta Kappa and Departmental Honoree in IR, and he won nationally competitive awards for Critical Language Studies (CSL) and Fulbright.  The latter two will take him back to Turkey for the 2015-16 school year. Eduardo plans to pursue a Ph.D. in Political Science in the area of migration and refugee studies.  Already having distinguished himself at such a remarkable level, we have no doubt that Eduardo will go far and make SF State proud.