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I've just graduated from college, so my input will be more on what I did in college, rather than my professional experience (because I don't have much).
I would encourage students to be diverse in what they do in their first few years of college so that they can gain diverse skills and experiences before sharpening them towards the end of college. After my freshman year of college, I studied English literature and theatre in the Penn-in-London program. After sophomore year, I worked as a camp counselor in North Philly for a program that was part of Penn's Center for Community Partnerships. By junior year of college, I'd started to develop a focus. I studied abroad in Beijing during the spring semester, and when I returned, I interned for the Department of Defense in the office of the Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. I wrote my senior thesis on the Chinese navy and after graduation went on to intern with the U.S. Navy (as a civilian) analyzing issues related to the Chinese navy. My plans are to continue on to Navy full time for a year or two. I would eventually like to do a graduate program in international relations/ security studies and explore other related fields and sectors. Ultimately, though, my goal is public service, and I would like to make a career out of government service.
Kim Hsu, Class of 2007
I graduated from Penn in 2004 and from Brooklyn Law School in 2007. I chose to attend law school after graduating from Penn. I believed that I would become a human rights activist. However, I found that most human rights organizations were a bit too ideological for my taste, so I decided that I wanted to become a labor and employment attorney. I found that I really despised sitting at a desk, so I looked for a job that would allow me to spend time in court. I found a job at the New York City Administration for Children's Services which was actually in family law. I have been working at ACS for the past two months. I took the job even though it was out of my field because it allows me to spend so much time in court.
Joe, Class of 2004
I was in the IR class of 2004 and had spent my junior year abroad in Stockholm, Sweden. After graduation I enrolled in a Master's program in Development Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. While in South Africa I pursued many interests that started during my time at Penn, and I found that my passion was in international exchange programs and the volunteer tourism sector. Upon receiving my Master's degree, I participated in the French government's teaching assistant program in order to strengthen my linguistic capabilities and gain international education experience.I am currently a Program Associate in the International Exchange Programs division at the Phelps Stokes Fund. The main focus of my job is to administer the State Department's International Visitor Leadership Program, which brings emerging leaders and mid-career professionals from all over the worldto the United States fora three-week professional exchange. My IR education at Penn really helped to prepare me for this position because I need to be knowledgeable on a variety of political, social and economic issues from every region in the world in order to specifically tailor these programs for specific individuals or groups.
Katie Irvin,Class of 2004
I graduated from Penn in 2003 with a major in International Relations and a minor Hispanic Studies. After graduation, I pursued graduate studies at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS) at the University of California, San Diego, where I specialized in public policy and Latin America. I have interned at the San Diego World Trade Center as well as the Government Accountability Office (GAO), where I focused on international trade issues. After completing Master's degree, I began working at the Research Department of the Inter-American Development Bank, specializing in political economy, political institutions, and public policy issues. I also have published work on violence and social exclusion in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Heather Berkman, Class of 2003
I loved the study of International Relations attributing my choice of this major to my active involvement in Model United Nations throughout high school and actively continued with MUN at PENN. As an IR honors and Political Science double major with a minor in Econ, I graduated without a job. I did interview with several consulting firms and took the Foreign Service exam, but found I was not passionate about any of the career paths. So I started to apply to the alphabet soup of government agencies and in doing so stumbled across a little known agency, Diplomatic Security Service (DSS), an agency within the Department of State (DOS). (Be advised though it takes a year to secure a clearance so anyone thinking of US GOV job needs to start looking junior year.) DSS is the law enforcement arm of the DOS and is comprised of approximately 1500 agents worldwide. Domestically DSS is charged with the protection of the Secretary of State and visiting foreign dignitaries below the level of Head of State. The department also investigates felony passport and visa fraud. Overseas DSS is responsible for the safety and security of all Missions worldwide. In my short, five years as a DSS Special Agent, I have worked passport fraud cases in Washington, DC, and staffed the Operations Center—the 24/7 call center for the Secretary of State as well as all Missions abroad—protected numerous VIPs and been assigned to the US Embassy in Cairo, Egypt. Overseas DSS Special Agents are known as Regional Security Officers (RSO) and I had the privilege of working as an Assistant RSO in Cairo, Egypt and am current assigned to the US Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan in the same capacity. As an ARSO, I manage local nationals who work for the US government, liaison with host nation law enforcement/military and respond to terrorist incidents. While I never imagined myself in federal law enforcement after graduating from PENN, I couldn’t have hoped for a more fulfilling career. While much of my job is routine, there is never a dull moment or one in which my IR background has not helped me succeed.
Vanessa Freeman, Class of 2001
I graduated from Penn with a major in IR and a minor in French literature in 1986. In addition to my classwork, I spent my junior year in Paris with Penn's Reid Hall program. I'm currently a senior international trade analyst with the federal government, at the U.S. International Trade Commission. I've been with the Commission for 9 years now.
After Penn, started a management training program with Bankers Trust Company in New York, not a particularly international career path, but it seemed like a good job opportunity. I was there about a year but decided it wasn't for me, and that I wanted to go back to graduate school. For the year that I was applying, I moved to Washington, DC to be with my fiancée (also fromPenn), and worked in a trade association for the title insurance industry. Again not an international position, but one that introduced me to theWashington lobbying industry and political scene.
I started an MA/PhD program at the University of Maryland, College Park, in Fall 1988, in the Dept. of Government and Politics, with a concentration in international political economy and international organization. I finished my PhD in 1993 with plans to find an academic teaching job in the field of international relations. I was a visiting professor at George Washington U. for 2 years, but didn't get any tenure-track offers in a city that I wanted to live in.
About that time, my husband was offered a chance to go to England for 2 years, so off we went, and I was able to do some part time teaching at the University of Portsmouth, close to where we lived. When we came back, in spring 1998, I decided to look for government jobs in Washington, and got the job I have now. I see this job as a great way to combine my academic research interests with my more practical interests in international relations policy making. I get an up-close look at the trade and investment policy making process and do work I find very interesting.
My Penn education gave me the basics of political science and economics that I rely on now, and got me thinking about other areas to explore that set me on the path to grad school. My time overseas has also been a huge part of giving me an international perspective that I rely on in my work now. For my current position, though, a graduate degree is absolutely essential. All of my colleagues have masters degrees, some of us have PhD degrees, and I think the PhD has helped me achieve a senior position in my agency.
Laura Bloodgood, Class of 1986
Graduated FAS 1981, from what was then called the Honors Program in International Relations. Honors Thesis: "Negotiating a Jerusalem Agreement." My advisor was Hilary Conroy, a nice guy. The best professors for courses in my major, as best I can recall their names: a Professor Trachtenberg (who called my honors thesis naive, and he was right), and a scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute named Richard Bissell, and Professor William Kintner, and lecturer Harvey Sicherman. Every one a foreign policy hawks. They were an anemic minority then. I have the impression there's even fewer foreign policy conservatives associated with Penn now. To me, so sad that diversity of views has been all but stamped out at Penn.
A couple of years as a paralegal at Pepper, Hamilton & Scheetz downtown, where I learned I did not want to go to law school. During that time, lectured at Penn a few times on the nuclear arms race.
Then, M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University. In the middle of this 2-year degree, a one year stint in Israel as a consultant to the U.S. State Department, on a project via both State and CIA, looking at high tech foreign investment in Israel. M.A. completed in 1987.
Next, for six years, a lobbyist at AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, often called the pro-Israel lobby, where I focused on economic and military/weapons issues. Along the way, published a few articles and papers on foreign aid and on military cooperation.
1993, founded Technology Information Corporation, assisting defense firms in pursuing R&D contracts with federal laboratories. This evolved within a couple of years into Technology Information Corporation's current activities - manufacturing and marketing special devices used in electronics manufacturing. Concurrently, since 1993 have advised governments on weapons financing and counter terror issues.
Martin Ingall, Class of 1981
I have a Ph.D. from Penn's long since defunct IR Ph.D. program, so my experience and job-path is linked to that, not to my undergraduate major. I doubt, therefore, that my experience is relevant to someone whose thinking about a professional future is based on just an undergraduate degree.
Dr. Adam Garfinkle is editor of The American Interest magazine.
He has served as principal speechwriter to the Secretary of State (S/P, Policy Planning), as editor of The National Interest, and has held appointment as professorial lecturer in American Foreign Policy at the School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS), the Johns Hopkins University. He has also taught U.S. foreign policy and Middle East politics at the University of Pennsylvania, Haverford College, and Tel Aviv University.
Dr. Garfinkle has served as a member of the National Security Study Group (as chief writer) of the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century (the Hart-Rudman Commission), an aide to General Alexander M. Haig, Jr., and a special assistant to Senator Henry M. Jackson.
His book Telltale Hearts: The Origin and Impact of the Vietnam Antiwar Movement (St. Martin's) was named a “notable book of the year” (1995) in the New York Times Book Review.
Dr. Garfinkle is also the author of Israeli Politics and Society: Myths and Reality (1997; 2nd edition 2000); War, Water, and Negotiation in the Middle East (1994); Israel and Jordan in the Shadow of War (1992); The Politics of the Nuclear Freeze (1984); and Western Europe's Middle East Diplomacy and the United States (1983).
His essays have appeared in The American Interest, The National Interest, The New Republic, the Times Literary Supplement (London), Middle Eastern Studies, The Washington Quarterly, The SAIS Review, Political Science Quarterly, National Review, Policy Review, Orbis, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Prospect and other journals. Dr. Garfinkle has also published in the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Jerusalem Post, and other newspapers. He has appeared on national and international electronic media, including National Public Radio, CNN, BBC World News, CBC, and the McNeil-Lehrer Newshour. Dr. Garfinkle has also served as a consultant to DFI-International, the Northrop-Grumman Corporation and J.D. Powers Associates.
He has been the recipient of awards and grants from the U.S. Department of State, the Fulbright Fellowship Program, the American Academy in Berlin, the German Marshall Fund, the United States Institute of Peace, and the Moshe Dayan Center for the Study of Middle Eastern and African Affairs (Tel Aviv University). Dr. Garfinkle received his Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Pennsylvania (l979). He is married and has three children.
The Air Force sent me to study IR at Penn to prepare to teach at West Point. After two years of graduate study, I taught Far East history and IR at West Point for 4 years. Then I returned to my primary duty as a pilot until near the end of my military career I was a foreign military assistance official and used my IR knowledge in dealing with Pacific Rim and Indian Ocean nations.
Adam Garfinkle, PhD, 1979
I was enrolled in the IR Program at Penn in 1977-78. At the time, I was a recently-commissioned Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army and had no immediated prospect of doing anything "international." As my Army career progressed, I was designated a "Foreign Area Officer" (FAO) with Western Europe as my area of expertise. (In the Army, FAOs are known as "soldier-statesmen" because they combine the military experience of the soldier and the "international" expertise of the statesman/diplomat. FAOs are assigned to positions throughout the world, in military units and headquarters organizations, as well as in non-military organizations, such as the State Department.)
In the early 1990's, I began the "international" part of my career. My last Army assignment was as a FAO working on European conventional arms control issues with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. I was able to continue with the same responsibilities in a civilian capacity after my retirement from the Army in 1977. Although the Agency was incorporated into the State Department in 1999, my position and functions continue even now.
So much for the "how," but "what" am I doing? I am part of a team that coordinates U.S. policy as it related to arms control issues in Europe. This includes overseeing implementation of a number of treaties and agreements to which the U.S. is a party. To execute my responsibilities, it is important that I understand not only U.S. goals and objectives, but also those of our European allies and partners, especially if they are not completely in line with our own. In addition to being involved in the U.S. government interagency policy development process, I am a member of the U.S. delegation that participates in the implementation bodies associated with these arms control treaties. These bodies are headquartered in Europe and meet routinely to discuss current implementation issues and sometimes to negotiate related measures.
Donna Phelan, MA 1978
Since September 2005 I have been the US Ambassador to the Republic of Macedonia. After graduating from Penn I worked for a year as an administrator for an American College in the UK, then returned to Philadelphia and earned a Masters in Journalism from Temple University. While studying at Temple I was also employed in successively more responsible positions in the field of international education administration (study abroad advising, administering Temple's Study Abroad programs) and ultimately became the Director of the Office of International Services at Temple University.
While living in the UK in 1972 I had [assed the written Foreign Service exam but decided to continue my education before moving to the Oral. In 1976-77 I successfully passed both parts of the Foreign Service exam and I left Temple University to join the Foreign Service in August 1978. I attach the site for my C.V. as displayed on the website of the US Embassy in Skopje Macedonia for the details of my assignments over the years.
http://skopje.usembassy.gov/bio.html
The Foreign Service is a marvelous career. I strongly recommend it!
Gillian Milovanovic, Class of 1971
Undergrad was my last degree, & I continue to recommend post grad for those with a serious interest in an IR career path.
For personal reasons, I chose a low risk career path---federal civil service. I had applied to USIA, but they wanted folks with prior experience. With the new NSPS (Nat'l Security Personnel System), I'm not sure civil service is now a lot less risky than the private sector (although, frankly, I think I benefited financially from NSPS in my final pre retirement years). In '62, I started in inventory management with the Defense Logistics Agency, was drafted in '63, worked in Ordnance supply in the Army, and returned to DLA in '65. I transferred to an Army agency on Rittenhouse Square in '68, still in inventory management. In '72, I obtained a promotion into the Int'l Logistics Office (later yclept Security Assistance & now Security Cooperation), i.e., Foreign Military Sales. In the job interview, I recall telling the interviewer that I was particularly qualified since this area would tie into my educational background. In '74, our office moved to Ft. Monmouth, NJ. Later that year, I obtained a promotion to an Army Security Assistance Command in Alexandria, VA, with primary involvement with Israel, Turkey, & Spain programs. In '79, in conjunction with an Army logistics course at Ft. Lee, VA, I took & passed the Int'l Society of Logistics (SOLE) Certified Professional Logistician (CPL) exam, receiving a CPL certificate (may no longer be current because of my failure to complete continuing education requirements). However, it was not a great career benefit because from then on, the Security Cooperation career path increasingly diverged from the logistics (supply, maintenance, & transportation) path. I dropped CPL from my business card after several inquiries about who this corporal was. In '85, I received a promotion to the Army Staff in the pentagon, where I spent the remainder of my career till retirement in '06, primarily working with Pacific region countries---ASEAN, East Asia, & South Asia countries. OBTW, we were ejected from the pentagon in '98, owing to renovations, and my old office may not move back for years. That office was also moved about twice within the Army Staff structure in reorganizations. In hindsight, I think I could have secured more promotions if I were willing to transfer to the Office, Secretary of Defense (OSD) level Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) and to travel more. A goal for someone with advanced degrees and a regional specialty with an interest in working in Defense might be a billet in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Affairs) (ISA), where individual country desk officers are responsible for overall OSD country policy (Security Cooperation & other).
Mike H., Class of 1962
While in Penn’s IR Program, I worked as a psychiatric hospital aide, candy cook, and used car salesman – none of which were particularly international in character. After receiving my M.A. from the University of Washington in International Relations/Soviet studies (where I was a teaching fellow), I became a Presidential Management Intern, and my international career picked up a bit. In the U.S. Government, I worked in both the Executive and Legislative Branches:
Office of Management and Budget, as an examiner for a number of State Department, foreign aid, and National Security Council accounts.
U.S. Information Agency, as a budget analyst for Far East programs.
Office of the Secretary of Defense/ International Security Affairs, assistant desk officer for Vietnam.
U.S. Agency for International Development, office director, successively, for numerous Asian and Middle Eastern country programs, and special assistant to the Agency Counselor. After recycling myself as an environmentalist, I also was a delegate to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit.
White House (Ford Administration, on loan from A.I.D.), as a senior staff member of the Council on International Economic Policy, where I helped develop strategies for the North-South dialogue on international cooperation, President Ford's participation in two Economic Summits; and improving the management and organization of the foreign aid program.
U.S. Senate (Office of Sen. Rudy Boschwitz, on loan from A.I.D.), a legislative assistant for international environmental matters, and staff participant in the Inter parliamentary Conference on the Global Environment, chaired by Senator Al Gore.
After retiring from the Federal Government, I worked for PADCO, a private urban development/ environmental consulting firm, as a consultant on international housing finance programs, and Search for Common Ground, a conflict resolution organization, developing strategies for resolving significant issues of political and religious polarization in this country.
All the above jobs have significantly shaped my views on trust, intimacy, power, spirit, and the rest of life. I am now self-employed in care management for seniors, and as a writer of fiction and essays. My first children's picture book, Leopold and Clinton, will bee published mid-2008. I also act in community theater musicals.
Gerald Kamens, Class of 1956
My original interest in International Relations, which was stimulated by the creation of the United Nations during the my first years at Penn (I entered in February 1949) was in international economic and political issues. Because women were not allowed to matriculate at the Wharton School, I could not pursue my interest in economics and finance except in very introductory courses and one international economics course. However I figured that I could pick up the economics and finance later and I entered an IR major in my junior year (1950) and an MA program in IR in 1952.
Two Penn professors influenced my greatly. Professor Robert Strausz-Hupe directed me to focus on issues in the Near East. Courses with Professor Philip E. Jacob concentrated on conflict resolution, including atomic energy. Initially I thought of working for the UN or some other government agency doing international work. I was married during my first year of graduate work so that although I had several opportunities to work in Europe and the Near East I turned them down due to family commitments. Consequently by the time I began work on a Ph.D. in 1972 at George Washington University, I chose Political Science with a concentration in the field of American Science and Technology Policy, figuring correctly, that jobs were more likely in this field.
My career has been varied in terms of experience and application of academic pursuits. I have worked in academia, in city government, and in the private sector. Initially it was difficult to fit my expertise to the job descriptions. Interdisciplinary studies have become more common and this may no longer be a problem in some fields. In my first job after receiving a Ph.D., my employer was looking for someone with knowledge of American science and technology policy. This was sheer luck. But I went on to win grants for the consulting firm from the U.S. National Science Foundation for studies in other fields, including information and regulation. (This was what they were looking for at the time.)
During a year spent at the University of Indiana with my husband, I worked with a distinguished environmental policy professor, Lynton K. Caldwell, and we did a book together on science, technology and public policy. The field of technology policy broadened to include risk assessment and, with some heavy reading, I was able to qualify as a Director of a Technology Assessment Center at an engineering college.
Living in New York City I was curious to see if the city could be governed by the principles I had studied in school, so I took a job with the New York City Department of Transportation doing computer administration. I quickly realized that academic political science and city politics have very little in common. But I was challenged by the issues, even though many concerned mundane urban transportation policy.
Since retiring in 2001, I have become heavily involved with the Broward County Audubon Society in Florida. I am preparing information for a blog which covers airport siting, water conservation, global warming and rising sea coasts, and shrinking wildlife habitats. I have written several books and many articles on a variety of public policy subjects but I don't think listing them is particularly germane to your query.
Good luck and keep me informed. I was impressed to read that there is now an IR honorary society.
Hedvah Shuchman, Class of 1952
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