State’s Hometown Diplomat Program helps you receive a hero’s welcome at your high school.

Selling the Foreign Service in Canada. Again, as if this were even possible.

Sixteen senior Foreign Service Officers, known as Diplomats in Residence, are assigned to different universities throughout the United States in order to help recruit “the best and the brightest” into the Foreign Service. On DipNote, Barbara Cummings, Diplomat in Residence at Howard University here in DC, discusses her role as a mentor for young people wishing to join the Foreign Service, as well as a number of opportunities available to those interested in international careers, including internships and fellowships.

Find out more about Diplomats in Residence and locate the one nearest you.

For those interested in international affairs, it’s hard to beat being a Foreign Service officer. You can find all the details at the State Department website, but, in general, know that it is a long process — so start early. I happened to hit all of the gates at the right time and it still took ten months. Very often it takes much longer. 

The U.S. Foreign Service is divided in two parts — Generalists and Specialists. Specialists are hired to perform specific tasks, e.g. maintain an embassy’s computer systems overseas, coordinate embassy security, etc. Generalists are what you typically think of as U.S. diplomats overseas. Generalists are divided into five focus areas called “cones.” You choose your cone when you first sign up and it is VERY VERY difficult to change cones once you join so choose wisely. 

The five cones are: Political, Economic, Public Diplomacy, Management, and Consular. As one would expect, Political Officers deal with political relations between the U.S. and foreign countries. Economic Officers handle economic issues. Both of these cones require lots of reporting on developments in a host country. You basically spend your whole day meeting with counterparts and then reporting back to Washington what you have learned. These officers also convey formal messages from Washington to foreign governments. 

Whereas Political and Economic officers work behind the scenes directly with government officials, Public Diplomacy (PD) Officers interface with the public and media. They are responsible for crafting U.S. policy positions for release to the public. Management Officers run the nuts and bolts of an embassy — facilities, personnel, etc. Consular Officers are the ones who try to help you out when you’ve gotten in trouble overseas. They have the lead on dealing with American citizens overseas — issuing passports, reporting American births, visiting U.S. citizens detained in prisons overseas. These are also responsible for interviewing foreigners who want visas to visit the U.S. 

The traditional route to becoming a Foreign Service Generalist requires you to pass a written test, an oral exam, medical clearance, and then a security screening to allow you to view classified material. Though it may help, there is no requirement to have a background in international relations or languages. I, for one, studied engineering and was a civil engineer before I joined. [My emphasis.] Other colleagues have been nuclear physicists, screen writers, and one was even a classical ballet dancer. The U.S. government just wants smart people who are quick on their feet and can handle any situation thrown at them. Simply put, if you can pass the tests, you can be in the running. 

Personally, I am a Political Officer and have worked in Ecuador, Russia, Washington D.C., and Germany. Most tours are 2-3 years and you can usually take your family — except to war zones like Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. (However war zone tours are usually one year long.) My hours are very long and my workload is largely dependent on whatever news happen to break around the world. However, I have found the work to be fascinating. We plug into what is going on behind the scenes and joke that things have gone wrong if our efforts show up in the news — unless you are, of course, a PD officer. Foreign Service officers spend much of their time living overseas so you have to adjust to different languages, cultures, and being away from ND football — unless you are lucky enough to be at a post that has access to the U.S. Armed Forces Television Network.

Many thanks to Hugo for allowing me to share this with Working World readers. And he’s right on about Notre Dame football fans: being out of broadcast range come game day is often the most troublesome part of living and working abroad. I hunkered down at 3:30 a.m. in my frozen apartment in the hinterlands of northeast China to “watch” games by refreshing the ESPN gametracker every thirty seconds. Pretty much the most tedious and awful way to take in a game, but true commitment takes sacrifice…

For me, training in Japanese, Korean, Dari, Icelandic and Mandarin Chinese, in that order, resulted not in approaching the desired level aspired to in Congressional speeches, yet it did help to sensitize me to the important cultural and personal understandings that were essential to developing and maintaining professional contacts.

[...] It soon became clear to me that just about all of my most important contacts had English competence far beyond what I could realistically hope to achieve in my scant months of study of their language. After all, many had studied English from their early school days, or even studied abroad. My linguistic struggles were more effective as an “icebreaker” than as a means to communicate substantively. When real substance was discussed, I found it essential to have a competent translator on hand. The advantages to that was a more formal discussion at a slower speed that could focus better on the issue at hand than on the imprecision resulting from my usually lesser competence in their language than they had in mine.

The full post is worth a read. Having studied a few languages myself, I would agree with Yates that “fluency” is a ridiculously tough thing to achieve—and it’s very subjective. I’ve had people, after seeing me speak in French or Chinese, comment, “Wow, you’re pretty fluent, huh?” I would shrug and say, oh so modestly, “Well, not really…” But the truth, of course, is that I’m not even close to fluent, in a professional sense, in either language. [Why do people think I'm fluent? Most likely because 1) they don't speak that language at all so don't have a frame of reference and 2) when I do speak my intermediate Chinese or my once-advanced but now intermediate French, I do so in a confident way that makes it seem like I really know what I'm doing.] Despite my lack of fluency, my language studies and skills have helped me in my career in, as Yates notes, cultural understanding and ice breaker type situations. But certainly in professional settings, especially when using Chinese, I’ve always, without question, relied on my counterparts to use English or on translators. 

So, getting back to the main issue, is it a bad thing if our FSOs aren’t native-level in several languages? Not necessarily, it seems. As Sherry noted in a discussion we had about this article and this topic, she has often thought that genuine curiosity and keen interest in learning about others (including their language) are even more critical to success than fluency in a language. Of course, she said, we want our FSOs to be as proficient in languages as possible—but other skills (such as cultural and historical understanding) are also essential. That’s not to say that we don’t want Americans studying languages to the point of native fluency—we certainly do. But it’s just to note that 1) it perhaps doesn’t need to be a requirement of all FSOs to be fully fluent in the language of the country in which they are serving; and 2) just because you aren’t fully fluent in a language doesn’t at all mean that the knowledge you do have of that language and the effort you’ve spent studying it is wasted.

Follow her in her quest—or at least take a peak through her blog, especially if you’re in the process of applying to or considering the Foreign Service. Her real-time, learn-as-you-go thoughts and insights on the FSO application process seem immensely useful: How do you prepare best for the OA? (Practice and repetition, until it’s second nature); How do you overcome nerves at your OA? (Look at it as an interesting way to spend the day rather than a terrifying experience); Do men gain an advantage by wearing wingtips to their OA? (No, unless they really look good in wingtips).

A hiring initiative called Diplomacy 3.0 now calls for the State Department to add 750 generalists and more than 500 specialists this fiscal year and a similar number next fiscal year. Most people apply to work in public diplomacy and politics; the agency is seeking more management, consular and economics officers.

Also of note from this article is the tidbit that State is not just looking for young applicants, but more experienced ones as well:

The State Department is trying to be more accommodating of older applicants. Many more people are joining in their 30s, Dry said. The peak age is about 30.

“We’re all interested in talented people who may be on the rebound from these other jobs,” he said.

No one will get rich being a diplomat, he warned, but said, “This is a time in the sun for the State Department.”

State may hire as many as 1,000 new Foreign Service officers in Fiscal Year 2010 if Congress approves the Department’s budget request.  Considering that there are no more than a thousand FSOs in the public diplomacy career track at this time, a healthy share of the thousand new officers could make a critical contribution to public diplomacy’s effectiveness by lowering vacancies and enabling adequate time for training between assignments.

UPDATE: I neglected to mention, though should have, that Joe is a distinguished member of the Public Diplomacy Council and introduced Sherry and me at a PDC event featuring Working World several months ago. The PDC holds a good number of interesting events in DC, all of which give young professionals and job seekers access to some of the most accomplished professionals working in public diplomacy.

I’d like to point out that the hardship differential is not designed to compensate Foreign Service Officers for dangerous duty. The hardship differential is paid for a variety of reasons: if the duty location is heavily polluted, or if it is very isolated, or if it is in a very poor area and amenities are hard to come by, and so forth…

Hardship pay is separate from danger pay, which is paid for tours where life and limb are risked.

Mrs. Clinton said the policy change addressed an inequity in the treatment of domestic partners and would help the State Department recruit diplomats, since many international employers already offered such benefits.

A response to its poor benefits and family culture rankings? Possibly, but probably not. The long-overdue reversal of a shamefully discriminatory policy? Absolutely:

“At bottom,” [Clinton] said, “the department will provide these benefits for both opposite-sex and same-sex partners because it is the right thing to do.”