As an international affairs major at GW living in Washington D.C., it is quite difficult to have never heard of the State Department and of the many internships one can participate in through other branches of the government.

Starting my degree, I always contemplated the State Department as a final dream possibility that would have satisfied my interests in public policy and could also take care of my inevitable curiosity for how and just what all of those government bureaucrats running around our campus really did. Around the middle of my sophomore, year I began the search and research to intern for the State Department, a tedious and lengthy process that eventually took several months. “Where and who have you lived with for the past seven years?” “Where exactly have you traveled abroad in the past seven years?” The hardest questions came when I was asked if I had any close contacts with foreign citizens. Technically as a dual-citizen I was foreign! I found myself having to answer questions in interviews on whether or not I was more loyal to Spain or to the U.S., and of who I would fight with if a war broke out between the U.S. and Spain, (a very unlikely possibility considering Spain was one of the only countries to support Bush in the war against Iraq). Once all of this process was finished, I was pretty much assured a spot as an intern in the place I had agreed.

Do most of you know one can actually intern abroad in Europe with the State Department? I only found this out myself when I got a call from a U.S. representative for NATO in Brussels who said she had read my application, and wanted to offer me a spot for the fall of 2002. Was this even possible, I thought? I was always thinking of that big building in front of the Elliott School, not of Belgium! Unfortunately, I had to decline because I had not planned to go abroad in the fall and I had already mapped out my whole semester. For the spring of 2003 however, I was convinced I would “kill two birds with one stone” and re-apply to go to Europe. I got calls from Moscow, Geneva and Vienna, and eventually chose Vienna because the city seemed like an ideal mixture of safety, culture, history, and it was in the heart of Europe! I also ambitiously thought I might learn some German, which ended up not happening as much as I would have liked.

Officially I was the spring 2003 intern for the “U.S. Mission to International Organizations in Vienna”. For my purposes, this ended up translating into the “U.S. Mission to the United Nations”, more concretely, to the “U.S. Mission to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime” (UNODC). For a person who had done Model United Nations both and the high school and college levels for more than seven years, to step foot in the real UN as a delegation representative was an absolute thrill and honor! The U.S. Mission offices were in walking distance from the United Nations building, which was located on an island of the Danube River in Vienna. The setting and views from our offices were spectacular, and the UN building (there referred to as the Vienna International Centre- V.I.C) was to my surprise extremely large and complex to understand! Vienna is one of the UN’s main bases along with New York and Geneva. The Vienna International Centre (V.I.C) is a vibrant and incredibly enriching environment where delegates from all over the world are constantly moving from one place to the next.

My job as an intern ended up teaching me a great deal about how Model UN simulations and international affairs classes actually translate into the realities of fast-pace decision-making and true diplomacy. I was able to act as an aid for six negotiations during my four months there, with topics ranging from outer-space affairs to crime and corruption. It was interesting to see how the U.S., a larger country with extensive resources was usually able to send a new specific delegation for each negotiation. For the UNODC Corruption Negotiations held in March 2003, the U.S. government sent a full delegation of about 12 lawyers, mostly from the Department of Justice. Smaller and poorer countries tended to have the same permanent representatives for everything, and I was actually able to build more personal and friendly relationships with many of them.

My language skills in French and Spanish came in handy whenever we needed to discuss certain changes and possible resolutions with the frequently active “Andean Region” countries, or with some West African French-speaking countries. UN official translators can be a little expensive when there is a young, eager, intern, willing to learn and meet important foreign officials! I was able to act as a free interpreter for several high-level meetings between the U.S. and certain Latin American countries. The tone and character of these meetings was always one of respect and was full of diplomatic ambiguities that kept relations stable and positive between nation officials. I was also able to observe meetings in real life can also go into deadlock like the one’s we have seen in students debates and Model UN conferences.

All in all I can say that my experience at GW and in Washington D.C. prepared me well for the internship. Nevertheless, I was able to conclude that the real world doesn’t necessarily represent the idealized and simplified models we learn and hear about as students. I guess it is only a matter of time before all of us delve into this maze of real-world opportunities, to finally begin to influence and direct our own changes to the course of world affairs.