By Mike Pugliese
Assistant Sports Information Director

NEW YORK, N.Y. - Every year in the United States, roughly 5,000 college students apply for the Fulbright Student Grant. Of those 5,000 applicants, less than 20 percent are chosen to receive the prestigious award.

Kevin Barbosa, a 2018 Bard College graduate, former student-athlete and former Speaker of the Student Government, was recently chosen as a recipient. The Fulbright U.S. Student Program offers research, study and teaching opportunities in over 140 countries to recent graduates and graduate students. Barbosa plans to complete the program in Mexico City.

Barbosa's path to receiving the grant was certainly an interesting one. After graduating from Bard, he landed a job as an Analyst in Goldman Sachs' Litigation-Regulatory Department in New York City. In his role, he assists Goldman Sachs attorneys with various legal inquiries from clients, regulators, and members of law enforcement. Barbosa says he was drawn to the role because of the opportunity it granted him to learn about the intersection of finance, law and government.

"Bard students are constantly thinking about our role in the world around us," Barbosa says. "When I first joined GS as an intern, we were in the midst of the 2016 presidential primaries. The banks seemed to be tied up in every important conversation about climate change, capitalism, and inequality that we were having at that time. Much of what Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton were debating with one another about was the proper role of the financial services industry in our society, and I knew I wanted to learn more, up close and personal."

Despite all he had accomplished at such a young age and with his future undoubtedly bright, he wanted to do more. He says he found inspiration in some of the building block lessons from being a member of the swim team.

"Swimming is an individual sport, but it's all about the team at the end," he said. "We're all sitting in this chlorinated pool going back and forth, getting dry skin, and waking up at 5 a.m. to practice, but we're working towards a goal together. In that environment, I learned so much about life that still resonates with me today."

Goldman Sachs had helped Barbosa take his first steps into the world coming out of college, but he said it was his desire to help others that pushed him in the direction of applying for the Fulbright.

"I had always known that I wanted to go to law school, but I had spent much of the last year after graduating making sure that that was the right decision for me, personally and financially," he said. "While I felt confident by September that law school was the right path for me, I didn't feel right applying to school without trying something completely new. I also knew I wanted to get back to the roots of what I went to Bard to do: to think critically about the issues facing our society and try to find the best way to help. 'How am I going to make that happen?' I asked myself. Break it down into its simplest pieces, like swimming, and think about what the core thing is that you're trying to achieve."

Barbosa had done pro bono work at Goldman Sachs focusing on gaining asylum and naturalization status for victims of domestic violence. It prompted him to practice speaking Spanish, and it renewed his familiarity with Portuguese.

"I quickly befriended one of my clients' mothers, and she was living in southern Mexico at the time and would tell me all of these amazing stories about life in Mexico. As the son of two Brazilian immigrants, I felt so connected to my clients' family, and often saw reflections of what could have been pieces of my life in the lives of the young women I was working with. They had come here seeking a better life, just like my parents had, and had suffered abuse at the hands of awful men who would wield their undocumented status to intimidate them. Hearing these women's stories was gut-wrenching, not only because of the cruelty that they had endured, but because of how much of that cruelty was exacerbated by greater macroeconomic forces surrounding them."

"While the work I did with them taught me a lot about immigration and asylum law, it made undeniably clear to me that I needed to learn more about the economic challenges facing everyday citizens in Latin America," he concluded.

This was not Barbosa's first time thinking about emerging economies more broadly and Latin America specifically. His Senior Project was focused on Brazilian foreign policy from 2003-2015.

"The project was the perfect opportunity to honor my Brazilian heritage, and to cement four years of thought about international relations and human rights," he recalled. "Brazil at the turn of the century was really an anomaly in world history; it became a leader among this new generation of nations, mostly former colonies, newly democratic, that were beginning to shake up the traditional hierarchies of international relations. And Brazil did so through peace and consensus-building rather than force and coercion, something completely unheard of and quite shocking to anyone who is even a casual observer of global politics, or when compared to the bloody histories of the U.S. and Europe."

"When I really stopped and thought about it, I realized what my goal was: I wanted to live in Latin America and use the knowledge I gained in banking and finance to help an organization that was specifically targeting economic issues common in Latin America, and the Binational Business Program in Mexico was the perfect solution. It's the only Fulbright program like it in the world, and it focuses on a wide range of industries, not just the business sector."

Barbosa is intrigued by the decades-old economic problems Mexico is trying to solve, like the fact that more than half of all Mexicans don't have access to a saving or checking account. In addition, most Mexican businesses don't have access to credit for growth, and 90 percent of the business transactions in Mexico are done with cash.

"These factors leave most everyday Mexicans out of the formal economy, and by extension, the global economy," he said. "In a capitalist system, this means that people's survival and abilities to succeed are directly tied to their ability to participate in the market. I wanted to tackle those issues directly, so that hopefully there can be less stories about people having to leave Latin America to seek opportunity in the U.S., and more stories about people thriving in their own communities."

The Fulbright process was quite difficult, spanning several months and requiring multiple interviews, recommendations, and evaluations. Asked what the biggest requirement for the program was, Barbosa laughed, "Patience, because they take so long. So I just put it out of my mind and went on with my life."

He eventually heard back from the program in January that he had been selected for an interview, months after he initially applied.

"I was really excited but also nervous because this was going to be a panel of six people, we had a half hour for the interview, and they were going to ask me a wide variety of questions about the program and my intent in the program," he said. "I went into the interview and I ended up having a really enjoyable conversation with the folks that I interviewed with. From there it was about another two and a half months, and then we found out in the middle of April."

The program is currently delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but Barbosa will be interviewing with a group of financial technology companies in the fall, and looks forward to having the opportunity to learn more about and help tackle these big challenges in the Mexican economy. He is currently studying for his law school exams, and believes that his time as a member of the swimming team has had an impact on him in his professional life and will serve him well as he prepares for his next challenge.

"Something that I learned at Bard was discipline, and it was definitely something that evolved a lot over my four years," he said. "Speaking specifically about swimming, there's no other way to get better at it than by doing the same thing. You have to push the rock up the hill every single day. Studying for the law school exams reminds me so much of swimming, because they're very much alike. You have to have the perfect technique and you have to practice that technique over and over again. It's similar to my professional experience, it's attention to detail. They manifest differently but it's still technique, precision, and doing whatever you're doing in a way that you can walk away and say 'I'm proud of this.' So swimming was very much a physical manifestation of a wider mental project that I was learning at Bard, and that project, really, was just growing up."

Barbosa isn't sure of his plans following the completion of the Fulbright program, but believes he will look to attend law school. He understands the impact that COVID-19 has had and how that could change things, but hopes to return to a situation where he can continue to build on what is already an impressive career at the young age of 24.

"I'm going to be applying to law school in the fall, and I would expect that when I come back I will enroll full time," he said. "But I hesitate to say one way or another what could be happening because there are so many really serious things happening in the world right now, and unfortunately school may not look like what we've always thought it to look like. So the current plan is law school, here's hoping that we're all in a safe enough environment where that can move forward."