Hello everyone,
Thought I would start one of these blogs about me joining the foreign service. I am coming in from another branch of federal service in which I was displeased with how things were run (nothing as aggravating as being officially told by your supervisor to not do your job because of political correctness) so I hope this will be a good change and a way to grab a career I have always been intrigued with. First, I will give you a little backstory of myself. I only go into detail to try to give you an understanding of where I got to today to prove to those who wanted to join anything that seemed impossible is possible through a myriad of ways.
My first job I ever wanted to be when I was really young was an undercover FBI agent who drove an RV. Yes, I know that sounds odd but for some reason the ability to travel anywhere with my house seemed like a dream for me. Entering high-school, I decided to sign up for some aeronautical science course and in the process, got the opportunity to fly a plane. I decided to follow it up and perhaps being a pilot would be my calling.
I went to an aeronautical engineering college and quickly obtained my pilot's license at age 19. My family is not wealthy and the school I happened to be going to cost roughly around the same money as an ivy league one. In order to offset this cost, I joined the Army ROTC program, hoping to get a scholarship and a garaunteed job as a helicopter pilot for the military. As I have always been an incredible history buff, I took alot of world history and government electives right away. One class particularly struck me called Early American Foreign Policy taught by a professor Glenn Dorn.
He noticed my interest in foreign policy and invited me to join the university's model UN conference at Harvard and participate as a delegate for the nuclear proliferation debate where I would be representing Cambodia. The process was very eye-opening and from then on I knew I wanted to work in foreign policy some time in my life. I decided to leave that college and return to my home state to continue a degree in Political Science closer to home, if I wanted to return to the military I could always go to OCS (officer candidate school) when I was through I figured.
My first year in my new college (entering 3rd year overall), I met a very old and cantankerous political science teacher who I happened to disagree with on everything. I argued incessently throughout the class with him on nearly every topic he brought up as he was obviously a communist/socialist and slanted his teachings accordingly, of course without telling his students as such and claiming to be unbiased.
Being an independant myself, I hate it when things are taught to students in a politically biased way, be it one direction or the other. To give you an example of how he taught the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, he told us he would bring in two speakers to give us an account from both sides. Great idea I thought, this will allow students to make their own decisions with most of the facts. Well, I was incredibly wrong. The first speaker was an impassioned Palestinian youth who had since moved to the United States because life was too difficult in Gaza. He told us all about the settlement process and Israel's invasion of his people's ancestral lands and drew pictures and told his personal story mixed with a historical overview.
He did a good job and made a compelling case so I was eager to hear who the opposition speaker was. She happened to be a priest of an offset of Judaism which not only believed that Jewish priests could be women, but also lesbians, which she was. Fine, I thought, she may not be orthodox but she seems like she could hold an argument. To top it off, she was vehemently anti-Israel and agreed with virtually everything said by the Palestinian and she said that America was a slave to the Jewish lobbyist groups and that was that. And that was the end of our debate. Both sides were "equally represented" and now we had to write about which "side" we agreed with and why......
To Be Continued.....
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