Tag-Archive for » foreign service «

03
Mar 2011

An Amazing Story

Me Missy

I won’t get into the irrationality of politics or the strange rage against federal employees that has been whipped up by the press recently, but I do find a particular item on the latest budget to be quite mystifying. It is a call to cut the pay of foreign service members serving abroad — more specifically, only junior or mid-level foreign service members serving abroad — and it has definitely touched a nerve, since so many other institutions (CIA, Civil Service, USAID, etc) have not been touched. In fact, there is so much misconception out there (I read a comment on a Washington Post article where the man was angry about ‘our’ diplomats cruising around in Cadillacs with diplomatic plates…um, those aren’t ‘our’ diplomats, those are diplomats from OTHER countries who are here. U.S. diplomats are simply called ‘citizens’ when they are in the U.S.) it really is stunning. Here is a great letter from Four Globetrotters, a blog about a family in the foreign service, and this story moved me to tears:

When a member of Congress and her staff were abandoned during this unrest at a downtown hotel by their Government of Togo hosts, I was the only American besides my then-husband, the Regional Security Officer, who could drive an armored vehicle.  The Ambassador dispatched me, and I drove through barricades and crowds to reach her and her staff and transport them safely to the Embassy.  My husband couldn’t go because he was off responding to a distress call from one of our Embassy families.  Their house was being invaded.

The mother and two children were holed up in the safehaven  while a frenzied group of thugs destroyed their home and personal belongings and worked to break into the safehaven where they were hiding.  All of us at the Embassy listened as the frantic calls for help came in over the radio, the children crying in the background.  My colleague wept as he heard his wife and children, helpless.  My husband knew he had to try and help, even though it would come at great personal danger.  He arrived at the house, unarmed due to a policy that did not permit him to carry his service weapon, and engaged at least two dozen thugs.  Relying on his training as a former marine, he quickly disarmed one person and used that weapon to disperse the remaining looters.  There is no doubt in my mind that had it not been for his intervention, the wife would have been raped or worse, and there is no telling what would have happened to the two children.  I waited, bordering on hysteria, by the radio to hear that my husband was okay and that our three children would not be left without a father.  He rightfully received the State Department’s Heroism Award for his actions on that day.

There are so many movies and stories about firemen and soldiers and Marines who are heroes that few people realize that the State Department’s job is not to have tea and crumpets with foreign dignitaries but to protect Americans living, working or traveling overseas. I did not even realize myself the lengths a U.S. Embassy will go to protect U.S. citizens living abroad until my friend joined the foreign service. Now I know that, when my friend L., living in South America, doesn’t answer the phone for two weeks, I can call the embassy and they will send someone to her apartment to check that she’s okay. In fact, one of the 13 dimensions looked for in a foreign service officer in order to qualify is composure in stressful situations. My example was helping my colleagues locate their children and leave safely in Washington DC during 9/11. There are many former military and others who join the foreign service because the mission is similar; to protect the U.S. And sometimes the pen IS mightier than the sword.

I don’t know if I will become an FSO or not — that’s still in the cards — but I certainly would like people to know about what the job entails, and maybe even about why I picked it. There are many ways to serve one’s country; this is one of them.

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10
Feb 2011

Wolves…and a short mention of the FSOT

Me Missy

Here’s the question: what do you do after you take a 3-hour test for the third time?

Answer: Hyperbole and a Half!

Yes, I just finished re-taking the FSOT (the TORTURE) and now my brain is sizzling, thank you. So, I offer comic relief:

Yes, I know, I’ve featured Allie’s stuff here before, but if you don’t already have her in your Google reader, HOW WILL YOU KNOW THERE IS MORE AWESOME?  In this post, she tells the story of 13-year-old Benny, who gets invited to ‘help’ at the birthday party of 6-year-old Allie and friends. When he agrees to play ‘wolf pack’ with a pack of 6-year-old, Idaho-raised girls, little does he know his danger, as they track him far into the forest.

These are my favorite lines:

Benny had severely underestimated our hunting and maiming capabilities. We were not like ordinary little girls who frittered away their time hosting tea parties and pretending to be princesses. We had spent countless hours out in the forest, sharpening our hunting tactics on imaginary prey and we finally had an opportunity to put all of our practice to use on a real thing that would run away from us and struggle for survival. Unfortunately for Benny, we had not yet developed the ability to empathize with the pain and suffering of other people, and his terrified fleeing was pretty much the most fun thing that had ever happened to us.

I think she might have just summed up my childhood in those first few lines, and I was thinking that as I watched Maya play “princess” and organize a tea party with all her stuffed animals. /sigh Anyway, go read it, she’s awesome again! Much better than writing an essay about…oh, you know, whatever, mumble mumble non-disclosure agreement, I hope I don’t have to take that test ever again, mumble.

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26
Jan 2011

The basic hoops for a foreign service candidacy

Me Missy

Have you recently asked yourself this question: “Wonder when Missy is going to get into the foreign service and leave the country with my precious grandchildren”?  Well, here is a very long and drawn out answer.

A quick (ha ha) recap of the foreign service hiring process:

Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT) –> Qualified Evaluation Panel (QEP) –> Oral Assessment (OA) –> Security/Medical Clearances –> Final Evaluation –> Register –> Language Testing (Optional) –> A-100 Training Class –> Language Training (optional) –> Job.

This is a brief outlay of the hoops that must be jumped in order to become a foreign service officer, and disqualification at any point means GIVE UP or START OVER or DO NOT COLLECT $100, however you decide to look at it.

Here is my personal timeline (some dates are estimated):

FSOT (08/15/2009) –> QEP (09/05/2009) –> OA (01/27/2010) –> Med Clearance (03/15/2010) –> Security Clearance (03/17/2010) –> Final Evaluation (09/15/2010) –> Register (09/22/2010) –> Language Testing (10/15/2010)

Okay, so all I have left to do is get into training, right?  Well, it’s more complicated than that (of course!).  As you can see, I have already jumped most hoops, but there are a couple of provisos…

Every person who passes the oral assessment, which is a day long series of tests, demos and interviews, is ranked. When that person gets to the register, they are added 1) By order of rank, and 2) By date placed on register. So, say I am Josephine Q. Public, and I pass the OA (yay!) and there is exultation, beer and singing in the streets. Each section of the OA is ranked, and then those numbers are totalled at the end. There is a cut-off score, which, when I took it, was 5.25. A 7.0 is the highest score humanly possible, so someone who scores between 5.25 and 7.0 goes on to the next hoops, after which that person is placed on the register BEHIND everyone currently there with the same score. So, if Miss Public gets a 7.0 score, and there are 15 people with a 7.0 score ahead of her, she is #16 on the register.

Got it?

Okay. Moving on.

The truth is, scores above a 5.7 are pretty rare, and the current highest score on the ‘shadow’ register (an accumulation of scores voluntarily given in a Yahoo group) is 6.125 for my ‘cone’ or area of specialty, which is management. My friend Aaron scored crazy high, but he’s an overachiever like that. I (naturally) expected to fail, but instead I passed ‘giri-giri’, or, in English, by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin: I passed with a 5.3 (they don’t actually give 5.25s, so far as I can tell, so 5.3 is the lowest passing score).

So, if that was my score set in stone, I would currently be 93/112 on the register, which would be a nice ego-booster (look! I passed! But I’m never going to make it to training!) but I had an ace up my sleeve: Japanese. Here is one of those provisos I mentioned: knowing a foreign language gets me (brownie) points, which get added to my score, leap-frogging me above all those other saps who don’t speak but one language (‘Merican, of course). For Japanese (it varies) I needed at least a level 2 in speaking, meaning I could survive in a business environment without mixing the word for ‘toilet’ with ‘business letter’ (at least while sober). I hadn’t been in-country for 10 years (now 11) so I did some brushing up, and I felt like a big fool during the test (mixing up the word for ‘gulf’ with the word for ‘gang’, making a question about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill very ambiguous) but somehow, miraculously, I passed. Knowing Japanese gave me .17 to add to my score, so:

5.3 + .17 = 5.47

Okay, so Aaron still gets kudos for an extremely high passing score AND knowledge of Japanese (although back then Japanese counted for .4) but this was enough to leapfrog me over 60 people or so, putting me at 36/94 at the time (I think; now I’m 33/112). Great, right? I’ve jumped all the hoops, I’m in the upper third of all eligible hires, now to get into the next training class…except…

Oh. Government budget cuts. Right.

So, hiring slowed from 10-15 people per training class (roughly 4-6 training classes per year) to 5-7 people per training class. Oh, and remember, all those Aarons out there, who know a language AND get a really high OA score? They all go IN FRONT of me. See, it’s ranked by number first, then by date, so if I have a 6.5 and my friend has a 6.6, she goes ahead of me, even if I’ve been waiting on the register for a year.

So it’s just a waiting game, right? I mean, eventually I’ll be the head 5.47 person, and they’ll call me…right?

Of course not!  Around 20,000 people apply for the foreign service EVERY YEAR, and about 1000 people get to the level where I am currently, with around 400-600 who actually get hired, so there is continual new competition. It’s in the state department’s best interest to select the very best and brightest, and that selection continues, even on the register, as those who know languages jump ahead of those who don’t (languages are an extremely valued skill for a department that serves worldwide, obviously). So, there is a limit to how long you get to stay on the register, and that limit is 18 months. If a candidate isn’t called by the end of 18 months, s/he ‘expires’ from the register and starts again from scratch.

This means that being #33 isn’t that great of a deal, because yeah, I *might* get in, but let’s say every month 2 people who scored higher than me are added to the register (a very low estimate) and they take 5 people for a training class; that means that, in a year, if there were four training classes, I would go backwards and be #37, and if there are six classes, I would only go forward by three to #29. Well, I only get a year and a half, so that makes my chances pretty crappy, even including variables such as others who expire off the register ahead of me. So what to do?

Currently, if I don’t choose the GIVE UP option, I can do two things: increase my score, or start my candidacy anew. The thing is, Japanese is considered a hard language but not a critical one; critical languages are ones the State Department is desperate for their people to know, so they give a bigger bonus: .4 instead of .17. Even better, SUPER critical languages like Chinese and Arabic give a bonus of .5.

5.3 + .5 (.4)= 5.8 5.7 (you can only count ONE language bonus, they don’t stack)(Note: .5 is only for Arabic. I can get .4 for Mandarin)

Currently, a 5.8 5.7 would put me at #15 or so on the register — meaning I would probably get called to training pretty quickly. The other option is to start over from scratch…kinda. I can do what is called a ‘second candidacy’ by starting over with the foreign service officer test, but because I’ve already got my clearances and language bonus, I only have to jump these hoops:

Foreign Service Language Test (FSOT) –> Qualified Evaluation Panel (QEP) –> Oral Assessment (OA) –> Register –> A-100 Training Class –> Language Training (optional) –> job

Now, it’s possible to NOT pass part or all of these the second time — the Yahoo! board was recently filled with comments from people who either didn’t pass some part of the testing, or passed with an identical or lower score. There is no penalty for passing with a lower score, so no disincentives here to trying, but there is a time investment and, for those like me who have to fly to take the OA, a significant money investment.

So, I decided to hedge my bets, and I am currently a) taking Chinese, and b) retaking the FSOT on February 10th. I decided to go whole hog* on my second candidacy — what have I got to lose? — so I applied for public diplomacy as my specialty rather than management. It’s hard to know what specialty to choose; the job is technically a ‘generalist’ position, but there is some specialization that happens mid-career. I don’t have much management experience outside of my master’s-level courses, but Aaron claims that ‘shy’ people like me are better in management. Public diplomacy sounds pretty cool to me, but it sounds cool to lots other people, too, so there is stiffer competition in that specialty. Hard to say what I’d be better at, but since I’m covering my bases, I figured I would broaden my possibilities and apply to another specialty.

As for Chinese…it’s hard to say whether or not I can get to a speaking level of 2 by March 2012. I doubt I’ll be able to spend time in-country, and I’ve never become proficient at a language via a classroom, being more of a hands-on kind of girl. Marti claims I’m ‘good’ at languages, but that’s because I used to wake up speaking to him in Japanese, back when I’d practically forgotten English. He never really saw the struggle I went through to get to that point (it took me a month to learn my first word, tsuki, or moon — something my Japanese teacher liked to remind me of frequently) but it’s hard to say how I will do now that I have some language under my belt. I’m spending 2-4 hours a day studying plus class, but early language learning is so hard…like lifting a mountain, pebble by pebble.

‘The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.’ ~Confucius

So that’s it, folks — a ‘quick’ recap of the hiring process. I guess I could have just said “still waiting” but that isn’t as much fun, now, is it? Plus, writing this out is allowing me to procrastinate on my programming, a nice side bonus. :)

*Idahoism translation: whole hog = all out, do my best

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08
Oct 2010

Waiting

Me Missy

What am I doing right now? I am waiting for the Foreign Service to call and invite me to training, ending my happy lifestyle in Tucson and sending me into a swirl of newness — new job, new home, new location, new schools, new training. And while I am understandably anxious about all those things, and while I am definitely dreading the day Ben has to say good-bye to his best friend and the school he’s loved since kindergarten, there is a huge part of me that just wants to cut through all this waiting and get it over with already. You know, lance that wound? Stop the anticipation?

I have never, ever, ever been good at waiting.

Two dogs anxiously await their treat

They're not good at waiting, either.

Strangely enough, when I thought I wouldn’t get on the foreign service register, I was fine with the wait. I know I was fine because half the Yahoo! group who are also waiting to hit the register totally freaked out when I mentioned how long my file was in suitability review (5 months). Now every time someone’s file goes to suitability review, my name comes up as a specter…”I hope it doesn’t take as long as that ONE person (aka, me), who had to wait 5 months.”  I’ve now become the warning sign on the highway of the FS clearance process. However, for most of that, I didn’t really worry about it. In fact, I spent a lot of time reassuring people that it was perfectly fine, this was, after all, a top security clearance and a very important job, and ‘these things take time.’ By which I meant, “They are going to come to their senses ANY MINUTE and realize that I couldn’t possibly rate this kind of job after 9 years in the backwater of the American West combined with a short mommy-track, some random volunteer work and a master’s degree in a completely unrelated field? Right? Right????” So the length of the wait didn’t bother me, it just meant I had more time before I had to confess to everyone that I didn’t make the cut after all.

Yes, this is really how my mind works. Frightening, isn’t it?

But then I did make it. But oh, I was at the very end of the register! They knew to put me at the back!

But then I passed the Japanese exam. And suddenly, I wasn’t just on the register. I was on the register, and COMPETITIVE.

Can I just add that I have always been slightly bitter that I spent 8+ hours a day studying for almost 2 years to learn a language I was never able to use again after coming back to the U.S.? Hmmmmm?  Well, THE UNIVERSE JUST SHOWED ME, didn’t it? That psychotic, I-must-learn-this-super-hard-language-immediately urge actually made something happen 10 years later!  Oh, the vagaries of the universe!

Although it always has surprised and sometimes even impressed people. You know, that I’m American, and I speak another language, and it isn’t Spanish. YES I JUST WENT THERE. But seriously, my last name? It’s Hispanic. So when I mention I have a second language, there is a certain assumption made that that second language is Spanish. After all, if my first name was Sumiyo, they wouldn’t expect me to know Hindi, right?  I’m just sayin’. But the short version is — Japanese rocketed me up to the top third of the list, and now I’m one of the cool kids. Sweet.

Anyway, so now that I know I HAVE A SHOT AT THIS, all of a sudden the waiting is perfectly unbearable. I just checked the aforementioned Yahoo! group to see if anyone else was announcing an invitation to the January A-100 class (that’s the training class where “you’re in!” and you sign on the dotted line). It was the fifth time today, not including the 10 desperate minutes I spent trying to log on with my iPhone this morning while drinking my coffee.  And, it doesn’t count the million times I watched the screen refresh while I ate lunch. I WAS TRYING TO SOUND SANE HERE, PEOPLE. But yes, five times…plus a little. And the last time I checked? Oh, right. Those last two postings — they’re mine. Because everybody else is out on a Friday night doing something more interesting than waiting for the tea to boil and obsessively checking a Yahoo! groups board.

Four dogs wait anxiously for a treat

Except for these guys, of course. They have all the time in the world to wait for a peanut butter sandwich.

So here I am. Waiting. Waiting. WAITING.

This is just karma for never listening to my mom when she said, “Nice girls don’t call boys!”  Oh wait. That wasn’t it. It was, “Well, if you’re set on calling, at least wait a couple of days!” I never, ever listened to her advice. And here I am, waiting for things to change, waiting for decisions to happen and to say good-bye to good friends, waiting for good and waiting for bad and waiting for sad, too.

Sit, Missy, sit.

Wait, Missy, wait.

Good girl.

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