The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2016

56 JULY-AUGUST 2016 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Ink in My Veins BY ROBERT E . M I TCHE L L I was a mid-career transfer into the Foreign Service, a targeted recruit from academia with analyti- cal skills needed at the time by the U.S. Agency for International Development. With USAID I was able to continue what I was already doing, but without the time-consuming challenges of preparing courses, teaching and encouraging students. I missed that, but found programmanagement and development work very rewarding. Heavy time demands placed on overseas USAID staff didn’t allow much opportunity to plan for what one would do after mandatory retirement at age 65. But I greatly benefited from the one-month retirement workshop the agency offers those about to retire. I sorted out my financial and other challenges while slowly slipping back into my earlier academic environment by taking advantage of the learning and research resources in the Washington, D.C., area. Ink is in my veins, so writing (and publishing) compensates for my near-deafness, an affliction that makes social relations very difficult. I can live within myself, as I have had to discover. I do miss the challenges of an overseas Foreign Service career and certainly benefited frommultiple long-term postings in the Near East and Africa. But I was always a particular type of non- political activist, a disease that began well before my rewarding career with USAID. That early history helped me forge a mean- ingful post-retirement life. I’m still plugging away at publishing and both taking and leading courses for fellow (non-Foreign Service) retirees. Robert E. Mitchell’s long-term USAID postings were in Egypt, Yemen and Guinea-Bissau. The Middle East Journal published his “What the Social Sciences Can Tell Policymakers in Yemen” in 2012. He is the author of A Concise History of Economists’ Assumptions About Markets: From Adam Smith to Joseph Schumpeter (Praeger, 2014), and two other manuscripts are now with publishers. One is “ The Language of Economics: Socially Constructed Vocabularies and Assumptions,” and the other is a long cliometric history titled Soils, Vegetation and the Settlement of the Five States of the Old Northwest: Assessing the Decisions Made by Michigan Farmers and Lumbermen. Keeping the Mind Sharp in Retirement BY DAV I D SH I NN A Foreign Service career comes to an end for most of us at a relatively young age, our late 50s or early 60s. Assuming good health, there is a great deal one can do during a long period of retirement. That said, moving to a second career may be harder than you think, even when you seem to have all the right creden- tials. Armed with a Ph.D. and teaching experience at Southern University and the University of California at Los Angeles, thanks to the State Department’s diplomat-in-residence program, I thought advancing within academia would be relatively simple. But it soon became apparent that I had not punched the neces- sary tickets to assume a senior teaching position. So instead, I began adjunct teaching in the Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University. Tha t may actually have been the better choice, it turns out. While the pay is modest, I control my own schedule and effectively have no bosses—a huge plus after 37 years in the Foreign Service. The moral here is to be realistic about second careers and prepared to accept something less than your first choice. Everything considered, there is little I would change in my planning for life after the Foreign Service. Your spouse or partner David Shinn with his book, Hizmet in Africa , at the African Studies Association Conference in San Diego in 2015. COURTESYOFDAVIDSHINN