Check out this recent interview with U.S. Army Captain Justin Bitana. 

From the INTS news archive: Bitana graduated May 12, 2018, with a BA in International Studies. Bitana also earned INTS Program honors for his thesis, “Refugees and Conflict in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.” For Bitana, the honors thesis was personal. Violence and political unrest in the Democratic Republic of Congo forced his family from their home. In his honors thesis, Bitana wrote, “I was five years old when I learned what the word ‘refugee’ meant. It was early in 1996 that I became a refugee after a few months of being internally displaced and trekking from place to place for safety. My family and I embarked for Rwanda where we ended up in a refugee camp near the border. My first recollections are of seeing military vehicles loading refugees (mostly men) but I was very young, so I did not understand what was happening. I learned later that they were being taken to military camps to be trained to become members of rebel militias, and then sent to war in Congo.” Chris Casey reported in a profile for CU Denver Today, “In 2012, when Bitana was in his late teens, he and a few of his brothers received refugee asylum in the United States. He was too old, 19, when he arrived in Colorado to enroll in a traditional high school, so Bitana earned his GED. Then he enrolled at the Community College of Denver (CCD), hoping to improve his English.” After transferring to CU Denver, Bitana declared his major: International Studies. We are honored that he did.