“So I spent my summer working at our Embassy in Suva, Fiji, my first time outside of the United States. It honestly changed my life because, after that experience, I decided I wanted to be a Foreign Service Officer.”
“The experience has been incredible. I’ve learned so much about how to brief, how to alert, how to understand information. It’s been fascinating to see what our response is, how our interagency process works, how we work with the Defense Department, how we work with the White House.”
“Our job was essentially to re-engineer this airport to make it an evacuation center to marshal the volunteers from the embassy to do everything from making sandwiches to donating diapers. And our job was to get these people, many of whom had been traumatized; we had rape victims, people who had suffered horrible violence looking to us to be their sort of conduit to safety.”
“Mary let her career development officer know that I was going to be starting A-100, which is the orientation class, immediately prior to me joining the service. And they assigned us to serve together in Jerusalem. And in fact, even before it became policy to work to try to keep us together the way they keep together married opposite sex couples the department has been very good to us in terms of working to keep us together and having us serve together.”
“I am passionate about sharing U.S. values and culture through exchange programs and other artistic and cultural programs abroad. Despite my disability I have been able to open a world of opportunities for foreign students to study in the United States.”
“I’ve learned that whether you are a Political officer or a Consular officer, a Foreign Service Generalist has to be prepared to do anything necessary. One thing is for sure — it’s always an adventure!”
“I think part of our job is to understand the local psyche, the local thought processes, understand the nuances that are embedded in the culture and in the language. You really have to, to some extent, throw yourself in it. But you have to find that happy balance between understanding the local culture and promoting U.S. views as well.”
“So often when you’re in the United States you see the world from one view. But when you go overseas you see it in a whole different perspective, and so you have a more complete view of how the world really is.”