The Foreign Service Journal, April 2004

A Bird’s-Eye View of DRI During a gap between language and tradecraft training for my first assignment, I had a bridge assignment with the Diplomatic Readiness Task Force. My assignment was to draft a survey of junior officers, but I also spent time dis- cussing my motivations and experiences in joining the Foreign Service with the very people responsible for my, and many others’, employment with the State Department. Based on those conversations, I constructed the following brief narra- tive of the year-and-a-half-long process that brought me into the Foreign Service. While my experiences are by no means unique nor necessarily typical, I hope they will be of interest to others in the State Department community. You can’t make someone else’s choices. You shouldn’t let someone else make yours. First, as I learned in A-100, always lead with a biographic introduction. My parents immigrated to the United States from the Netherlands about two years before I was born. I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pa., earned a B.S. and M.S. in chemical engi- neering and worked for a few years with Fluor Daniel’s biotech/ pharmaceutical division in San Francisco before deciding that engineering wasn’t what I wanted to do for the next 40 years of my life. Throughout my years in university, I had harbored an interest in economics, international relations and current events and decided that the best place to combine those inter- ests with my desire to engage in public service was the State Department. Not knowing whether the Foreign Service need- ed Dutch-speaking engineers but figuring I had nothing to lose, I signed up for the exam on the department’s Web site. I took the written exam in September 2001 in San Francisco, a couple of weeks after the attacks of 9/11. Although the events of that day didn’t factor into my decision to take the exam, they did strengthen my intention to find a job that I wanted rather than a job that merely paid well. Three months after the written exam, I received a letter telling me that I had passed and that my oral assessment was scheduled for April 2002. Provided with the list of character- istics against which candidates are judged, I proceeded to develop a list of work, school, and personal experiences that illustrated times at which I had utilized those traits. I also spent an entire Sunday cooped up in my apartment trying to compile a list of jobs held, schools attended, addresses lived at, friends known, etc. over the previous 10 years of my life for my security clearance paperwork. What proved most useful, though, was a prep session offered in San Francisco by Steve Browning, a Diplomat-in- Residence based in Southern California. DIRs (not DRI — mind the acronyms!) are FSOs who spend a tour at universi- ties around the country to educate people about, and recruit candidates for, the Foreign Service, and to demystify the examination process. Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier. However these three activities factored into my oral assess- ment experience, I passed. I was given a conditional offer of employment and placed on something called the “Register,” pending security and health clearances and selection. I began my conditionally-employed waiting period with high spirits even though I had heard that candidates could reside on the Register for over a year before being offered a job. I still had a job at Fluor, my doctor used to work for the Navy so he knew exactly what I needed for my medical clear- ance, and I obtained my security clearance in about four months. I could wait a little longer. In fact, I only had to wait about two additional months to hear that I would receive an offer for the March 2003 A-100 class (the 112th). And here I learned another thing about DRI. While I was worrying about the meaning of life and what my career aspirations should be, I hadn’t thought much about the pay cut I would experience upon joining the government. But thanks to DRI, I didn’t have to forgo too much money. Some of my A-100 colleagues who came from law practices didn’t see it that way, but, to me, it meant a lot to know that the department was trying to match the private sector in pay while continuing to outdo it in benefits. And thus I ended up in an A-100 class of 92 people in Washington, D.C. Our class started with an expedited swear- ing-in, followed by a day in which we took turns interviewing and then introducing the person sitting next to us. It was then that I learned the wealth of backgrounds and experiences that the Foreign Service was attracting: teachers, fishermen, fashion designers, journalists, lawyers, recent college gradu- ates — and yes, engineers — speaking languages as diverse as Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian — and yes, Dutch. Be careful what you choose. You may get it. After the class introductions on the first day, we received our bid list. Given 10 days to pick our top 25 choices out of a list of 92 posts, we set about trying to figure out if we could handle two years in Bujumbura, Mexico City or Lilongwe. What was really surprising was that one person’s paradise was another’s least-favorite place on earth. Our A-100 instruc- F O C U S 26 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / A P R I L 2 0 0 4