The NYTimes recently reported on plans to retool the Foreign Service Exam ("The Foreign Service Exam; Rarely Win at Trivial Pursuit? An Embassy Door Opens"), which took me back to the fall of 1999 when I dragged my sorry self down to VCU's School of Business to spend a half-day in a locked room with 100 people willing to wear a No. 2 pencil to a nub in an attempt to receive a job offer from the U.S. Department of State.
The path to the U.S. Foreign Service has always been straight and
narrow: The first step is the written test, perhaps the nation's
leading smarty-pants exam. Since 1932, hundreds of thousands of
applicants have grappled with a half-day of questions on geography,
English usage, history, math, economics, culture and more.
"It's like being on a golf course," said Justin Norton, a
26-year-old who flunked the test this year and last, but wants to take
it again.
"You've got all the sand traps, the water hazards. I remember I
didn't understand the question about economies of scale. I remember
something about Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance.
"And sometimes even when I knew it, like a question about George Kennan and containment policy, I got it wrong anyway."
It is not an easy exam to study for. The State Department suggests
reading a good daily newspaper for a year. There are prep books, and at
places with lots of applicants, like the Fletcher School at Tufts
University, maybe even a study group. But mostly, people prepare on
their own, looking through a world atlas, the Constitution or the word
problems they did on the SAT.
I knew going in that the odds were long -- close to 75% of the 20,000 people who take the written examination flunk. That didn't stop me from anxiously rushing to the mailbox of our apartment every evening in January of 2000, or internally dancing for joy when I was notified that I passed the written and exam and was invited to sit through orals in April. (This was before I knew how to physically dance for joy.)
My first wife and I drove to DC and stayed overnight at a B&B, and I woke early and made my way to Foggy Bottom for what proved to be a nail-biter of a day. There were, I think, 20 candidates in my "cohort" of Foreign Service second-stringers -- at the age of 32, I was the third-oldest person in the group.
Five at a time we were handed envelopes with background information and hustled into interview rooms. We sat at a small round table with four State Department observers sitting quietly in each corner of the room. The scenario: Each of us was an embassy official sitting in a budget discussion. Each of us, based on our information packet, had a particular agenda in the discussion. All I remember, in retrospect, is that I stayed on the edge of the conversation initially, listening as the other four candidates worked to carve their agenda out on the meeting room table. Carve they did -- each other to pieces. As we neared the end of the discussion, I quietly inserted my own agenda -- and worked to weave it among the shards.
Round two found me in a small room with two senior Foreign Service Officers -- one reminded me of Ricardo Montalban, the other of a mature version of Fat Albert. They ran me through some additional scenarios, and answered a few questions that I had. I was beat. I then wandered back to the waiting room to rejoin my equally tired compatriots.
One-by-one, we were ushered out of the room to discover whether we made it through this second hoop. Each candidate left the room, received their news and left through a back door. I was surprised to leave the room and be ushered into a room with one of two female candidates in my cohort; we were joined by Ricardo Montalban, who announced that the two of us were the only two of our group of 20 to pass the oral stage of the process.
I danced for joy, internally again, and went into waiting game mode. My name was placed on a waiting list -- it would remain there for as long as a year, I was told, before I would be made an offer. And exactly a year later, just as my first wife and I were in marital meltdown, the offer came.
I had one week to make a decision. Among the people I talked to was my old FSO buddy from orals, Fat Albert. As we chatted on the phone and he described his "high point moments" from his decades-long career, I mentally put an imaginary gun to my forehead and decided that I might prefer to leap from a tall building than join the version of the Department of State he was describing.
His best moment in his long career was -- no joke, this -- negotiating a new lease arrangement for the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nation's residence at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. Visions of sharpening boxes of pencils and ordering shoe polish for ambassadors danced through my head.
I walked away from my dream job as a Foreign Service Officer in April of 2001 to work on my marriage, and to avoid the bureaucratic nightmare painted in my phone conversation with my one State Department point-of-contact. The placid pre-September 11 world of the first George W. Bush administration offered little in the way of enticement for a mid-career professional who had a fascination with the Arab language and the politics of the Middle East. Little did I know how much the world would change in just five short months.
I look back at the process, and my decision, with few regrets -- and at least one tiny touch of polish on my ego. Despite the changes pending in the exam, "the very small percentage we take will still be the smartest, most qualified people representing America," says recruitment director Marianne Myles.
