The First Day

As of about 9am this morning I became an official representative of the United States of America.

I arrived at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) bright and early and began the immediate regression back to college. The training facility is massive and made up of multiple buildings scattered across a pretty campus larger than my own alma mater. I was processed, given a name badge and security tag, and then we were taken in groups in a whirlwind tour of the campus. At this point I don’t really remember where anything is, but there were definitely geese and a pond.

We started the day with an informal meet and greet with members of the 127th class — the class that started two sessions before your own is your official welcoming class and, as I’m in the 129th class, that makes the 127th our mentor class — and we enjoyed coffee and pastries while getting to know each other. There are 74 of us in the class so it will take a few days before the names begin to truly stick. My bleary eyes had barely cleared and the coffee hadn’t even taken effect yet before the director of the institute was making opening remarks and then suddenly swearing us in. It was a surreal, yet satisfying moment, as 74 men and women in unison pledged to uphold the Constitution of the United States. We have a formal swearing in ceremony after the seven week A-100 orientation class, but this is the swearing in that truly matter because it makes us official Foreign Service Officers and able to receive paychecks.

The day went by quickly as we had several basic overview sections as to what the orientation, and the job itself, entail. The training staff all appear to be top-notch and did an excellent job of keeping everything fun while at the same time letting us know it was a serious business. In a few days a biography of me, compete with bad photograph, will be sitting on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s desk (where I’m sure it will be thoroughly read.) I even met my first ambassador today.

By far the most important and exciting event of the day was the handing out of our bid list. The bid list contains the 80 or so jobs that we will be ranking as high, medium, or low and giving back to our Career Development Officers (CDOs) to express where we’d like to go. Of course, we have all agreed to worldwide availability so they can really send us wherever they want, but the CDOs are proud that they have a 90% rate of sending people to posts they have listed as high. Over the next week and a half we will be researching the places thoroughly to come up with our list. I’m not going to list them all now, but in future blog entries I’ll let you know how it is coming along. I have to say that I really like our list. There are many places that I think we would enjoy living and working at.

Alright…I’ll throw out a few place names just to give you a teaser. Keep in mind (ahem, parents) that they are not necessarily places that we’re going to bid high on…just a sampling of places on the list.

• Baghdad (though not as desperate for people as you might think)
• Bridgetown, Barbados (it’s a tough job, but someone has to do it…)
• Mexico City
• Rangoon
• Warsaw
• Tripoli
• Buenos Aires
• Moscow

Okay. That’s all you get for now. As we start to work the list into categories, I’ll let you know what we’re thinking. There really are only a few places that we know we don’t want to go and those are places that are unaccompanied. In other words, I would have to go by myself. We’re in this together so we’ll do our best to avoid those.

A good first day.