I'm going to take the FSO exam in April

[Zech Marquis]

I figured, since my major was INternational Studies, god knows we could use a DUer in the State Department. The one question their website asked (as part of a way to determine if being a diplomat suits you or not) was if I can perfomr my duties, even if I diagree with the offical US ploicies.
Of course I don't like the "policy", but I hope that when someone needs my help in some embassy, they'll see me for who I am, not Condi and surely not * :evilgrin:

Has anyone taken the exam before? I was a military dependent, so the idea of moving every 2-4 years is not strange to me--staying in one place for longer than 3 years is :evilgrin:


Meanwhile, I'm going to get ready and root for the VA Tech Hokie sin the Sugar Bowl :bounce:

[Florida_Geek]

1. read if you have not read it

Joseph Wilson's The Politics of Truth... Good read for someone that wants to get in the line of work.

Talks about his moving around in the field.

[Zech Marquis]

2. is this the same guy

whose wife was leaked as being a CIA operative?

[Florida_Geek]

3. Right but a lot of the book is about his time

in the foreign office

[Lydia Leftcoast]

4. I took the exam in the late 1970s

It consisted of

1) A written exam testing your grasp of world affairs and cultural sensitivity

2) If you pass that, you're invited to an all-day in-person interview. This includes one-on-one interviews with two current FSOs, an in-box test in which you pretend to be the last-minute replacement for an FSO who has been evacuated for medical reasons; a simulation with other interviewees, in which you pretend to solve a problem in a meeting; and a foreign language aptitude test.

3) If you pass all that, you are asked to report to the nearest military base for a physical

I dropped out at that point, because I knew some people who had grown up as diplomats' kids, and they emphasized that I would have to mouth the current administration's line whether I agreed with it or not, and that even living abroad, I would be isolated from the local culture, unless I was assigned to another First World country.

Furthermore, the Foreign Service's explicit policy is to assign new FSOs to countries they know nothing about for their first couple of tours. The reasoning is that an East Asian expert who is posted to East Asia, for example, will be too sympathetic to the locals and won't promote the American line unstintingly. Therefore, they send you to countries where you are totally at sea and have no choice but to assimilate to the FSO culture.

I decided that it wasn't for me. Imagine having to defend the tortures at Abu Ghraib!

[Zech Marquis]

5. so...

instead of some east sian country, I could be shipped out to say..south America or Eastern Europe...