Buying Into the State Dept. Lifestyle

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Diane Castiglione
U.S. State Dept.

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Be prepared to demonstrate your writing abilities. If you're still a student, take classes that require that you write papers and really work on your writing skills. And just be aware of the world around you and what's happening and the current events. So read a good newspaper, read a good newsmagazine. To be really well-read and well-rounded is one way to approach it.

Is there the expectation that new hires are going to be working at the State Dept. for most of their lives, or is it understood that for some people this is just a stepping-stone to another career?

The Foreign Service is set up as a career, and I think the hope is that people will stay with the department for 10, 20, 30 years, and in fact many people do. But I think people understand that not everybody's going to approach it that way. Especially in recent years, people's attitudes on that are evolving.

But one of the nice things about the Foreign Service is you can change your job every couple of years, but never lose your job. Because we rotate every couple of years, you really do have many careers as part of a larger one. And I think that's one of the reasons why people will stay a bit longer: because you have that built-in stimulation and interest to keep growing, evolving, and developing new skills, new interests, new areas of expertise because you could go from working one minute in the Philippines on economic trade issues to coming back to Washington and helping to write orientation programs, which is something I did, for example.

What positions are available to new grads and how do those fit into the long-term career tracks at the State Dept.?

In the Foreign Service, for what we call officers or generalists, we only hire at the entry level. So regardless of where you are in your career—you could be straight out of school, you could have had several years of work experience, you could be going on your second or third career—you come in at the entry level.

And it's a system again that's very much set up like that pyramid structure, so you're going to move along in your career, getting promoted and gaining greater responsibility as you go on. The entry-level positions are definitely set up to lead you into a career path.

On the Civil Service side, you come in, again, at entry-level positions in a variety of areas that may be available—a program analyst or a budget officer, for example, depending on your background, your career, your interests. We hire in the Civil Service everything from interior decorators to lawyers, believe it or not. We have engineers, we have IT-type jobs—just about anything you can think of exists somewhere within the department. Maybe not in great numbers, but it very well could be there.

Are you looking for people with any particular skills?

We're definitely looking for people with language skills, particularly in languages like Arabic, Farsi, Korean, and Chinese, as well as people who are skilled in economics. But I think the only other piece of it is that, as representatives of the U.S. overseas, we want to be sure that the department reflects the talent and skills and diversity of the people of the U.S. A lot of times when people think of the State Dept., they think, "Oh, that's for the Poli Sci majors." And they couldn't be more wrong. It's not just for the Poli Sci, International Relations, or History majors. We really need skills and background of all sorts.

To be a Management Officer, for example, we would look for someone who has a business background and management skills to come in and help run the embassies. Information management or IT skills are definitely needed, and our Information Management Specialist position is a specialist category that a recent grad could consider. There are opportunities here for people with just about every kind of background, skill, or academic major that you can think of.

Obviously a career in Foreign Service isn't for everyone. What are some important considerations that people should take into account before applying?

There are definitely considerations, especially on the Foreign Service side of things. You have to buy into a lifestyle, and the lifestyle that's involved is not for everybody. That has nothing to do with academic background or professional qualifications or intellectual ability. It has to do with who you are as a person.

The career requires that you spend a good part of your career overseas. It means that you're moving around every couple of years from place to place. And it means that you're going to be working very often in difficult environments, sometimes dangerous environments. Not everyone is cut out to do that. I usually tell students that I don't say these things because I want to discourage them from pursuing this as a career. Far from it. But I want people to go into it with their eyes open and understand that you're not just accepting a job. You're accepting a lifestyle.

What do you say to someone who says, "I really want to represent our country, but I don't agree with everything that the current Administration is doing?"

That's another frequently asked question. Well, the answer to that is when you join the State Dept., when you accept a job with the government, you're a civil servant, and civil servants are expected to be impartial, objective, nonpartisan, and you're going to work regardless of the administration.

Now, if you don't agree with the policy, you have some choices. You have the opportunity, certainly, within the office environment to have those discussions and to voice your opinion and give your thoughts about how we might approach a particular issue. However, at the end of the day, when the decision is made what the policy is going to be or what the approach is going to be, you have to support it. You have to support it publicly—you have to advocate it, regardless of how you feel about it personally.

Now, if that's something with which you're not comfortable, you may want to rethink whether this is the right career choice for you. In the extreme, people have resigned over the years. There have been resignations as a result of our policies in Iraq, our policies in Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, in the late '90s. There were resignations over Vietnam. But there aren't a large number.

So if you stay and work, you can try to work to influence the policy from within. But as I said, if it's really that much of a dilemma for you, you can resign, or you may want to rethink about whether you want to pursue this as a career. But there's definitely opportunity to voice your opinion, to influence how policy is made and implemented, and to have your say.