THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2024 37 in a conversation with me later. He added: “The students were engaged and asked insightful questions. It was a wonderful experience!” With more than 100 students in attendance, the event catalyzed weeks of discussion among my peers. As more speaker events took place, we began to innovate: we’d bring two chapters together to hear a speaker, transcending geographic boundaries in the quest to share knowledge. Winchester Thurston in Pennsylvania and Sayre School in Kentucky stepped up to be the first. As Alexander Peris, founder of Winchester Thurston’s chapter (and currently HSFSA’s mid-Atlantic regional director), recalls, “The first event was a joint talk, and it gave Winchester Thurston chapter members a unique opportunity. They didn’t learn just from the speaker, a distinguished former diplomat, but from their Sayre School contemporaries, as well. Students came away both well informed about the U.S. Foreign Service, and excited that so many other young people shared their enthusiasm for diplomacy and foreign affairs.” Expanded Activities Beyond this, we worked to branch out and provide an even greater variety of resources to our students. We reframed the State Department’s Treaties and Other International Acts Series (TIAS) into an interactive map and Excel database, organizing 2,709 agreements concluded since 1981 into a medium that was easier for research and analysis while also demonstrating the titanic scale of the work put in by the Foreign Service. HSFSA also created a practice essay contest in collaboration with AFSA. AFSA’s popular annual National High School Essay Contest offers an opportunity for students to demonstrate their skills while writing about diplomacy, as well as a chance to win prizes. We developed the HSFSA Essay Contest to help students prepare for that AFSA competition in a lower-stakes environment. Using prompts from previous years of AFSA’s National High School Essay Contest, HSFSA asked member participants to submit short 500-word essays that would acclimate them to writing on a foreign policy topic. AFSA staff and former AFSA essay contest volunteers pitched in to judge the HSFSA essays; the first-place essay received a $200 prize and the honorable mention a $100 consolation. After the judging, AFSA hosted a webinar for contest participants to receive feedback on their essays and tips on how to best compete in the upcoming AFSA National High School Essay Contest. The first practice essay contest competition, held this year, was a great success, and many students greatly appreciated the tailored feedback they received on their work. On the chapter level, too, the diversity of activities grew. With support from HSFSA, chapters began organizing “Diplomacy Matters” awareness campaigns, collaborating with other clubs to give presentations about the contributions of diplomats to their topic areas (ranging from cinema to chess). These campaigns exposed thousands of students to how foreign policy affects their own areas of interest. All this was accompanied by regular and insightful discussions of current international events during chapter meetings. Chapters began organizing “Diplomacy Matters” awareness campaigns, collaborating with other clubs to give presentations about the contributions of diplomats to their topic areas (from cinema to chess). The interactive map of the Treaties and Other International Acts Series, part of HSFSA’s program to provide a variety of resources to its students, organizes 2,709 agreements entered into since 1981. Available on HSFSA’s website, it visualizes the true scale of diplomacy. HSFSA/MAPHUB.NET
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