Muttering Behind the Hardline and Life After Jerusalem have written posts about how they ended up in the Foreign Service. I’m kind of embarrassed to say this, but until last year, I had no idea what the Foreign Service was. I also thought that all diplomats were just appointed by the President.
It’s junior year and I see everyone around me franticly applying for jobs. With the bad news about the economy, soon to be college graduates were all too familiar with the statistics. Fewer job openings, lower salaries,. I mean, this is great news. After being billed a quarter of million dollars for an undergrad degree, suuure, why do I even need a job?
I already had my web development company but I didn’t want to continue that. I would’ve preferred to use my language skills and not be a computer geek for the rest of my life. So I started applying to any place that offered a great retirement package. Yes, I’m thinking about retirement. But then I heard about the Foreign Service. No idea what it was but the idea of a FREE test lured me. I headed to NYC and took the test and actually enjoyed it a bit. That was, until I walked out of the room and realized that I completely missed the whole point of the essay prompt. I think I was lucky, though. Having taken the SATs and APs somewhat recently, I found the format to be VERY similar so a lot of the methods that I learned from my overpriced sessions helped out. Thanks, Kaplan.
Couple weeks later, I received a thin envelope from the people at State. From my experience, the thinner the envelope, the worse the news. I was wrong and apparently, I achieved a passing score…
