FSOT Archives | Nicholas Kralev

Diplomats in the trenches: Improvising in a ‘Non-Permissive Environment’

Ference3 Matthew Ference belongs to a select group of American diplomats who passed the Foreign Service entrance exams on their first try. He attributes it to being relaxed and trying not to care too much.

When he applied in 2003, Ference, who is currently the public affairs officer at the U.S. Embassy in Laos, had already been accepted to two graduate programs. So he “didn’t study for the exams or expect to pass, which reduced the pressure immeasurably,” he said. “I didn’t grow up dreaming of being a diplomat, so I approached the written and oral exams like any other test ― great if I passed, but not the end of the world if I failed.”

More than 20,000 Americans apply to join the Foreign Service every year, but only several hundred are hired, depending on budget constraints and the service’s needs. About 40 percent of all candidates pass the written exam on average each time it is offered, according to the State Department, though many take it more than once. It’s a standardized multiple-choice test with questions about history, politics, economics, geography, popular culture and other areas, and also includes an essay. It doesn’t test for knowledge of the history or functions of diplomacy.

Of those who make it to the oral assessment, about a third are successful on average. It consists of a group exercise based on a case study of a fictitious country where the U.S. Embassy must deal with a certain situation, as well as an individual interview and a case-management exercise, in which each candidate must write a memo to a superior recommending a course of action…

>> READ THE FULL STORY ON THE HUFFINGTON POST

The State Department’s Diversity Problem

By Nicholas Kralev
Foreign Policy Magazine
May 22, 2016

When Naomi Walcott joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 2005, she was “delighted” to find a new class of officers that was diverse “in every possible meaning of the word: age, religion, ethnic and educational background.” To a lesser extent, she also found a diverse group at her first overseas post in Honduras. But when Walcott, a Japanese-American, arrived at the embassy in Tokyo in 2008, she was shocked to find a predominantly white male U.S. staff. “I was one of very few female officers,” she said. “I went through a bit of an existential crisis of wondering if this job was really for me, and whether there was a place for me in this organization.”

After over a decade into what the State Department says has been a dedicated effort to make the Foreign Service “look more like America,” it has found itself on the defensive in recent days, following criticism by Susan Rice, President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, about the lack of diversity among America’s diplomats and the rest of the foreign policy workforce. “In the halls of power, in the faces of our national security leaders, America is still not truly reflected,” Rice said in a commencement address at Florida International University in Miami on May 11, borrowing former Sen. Bob Graham’s description of the career services as “white, male and Yale”…

>> READ THE FULL STORY IN FOREIGN POLICY MAGAZINE