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Currently, I am the Diplomat in Residence representing the State Department in Southern California. But more fundamentally, I am in Foreign Service for the Department of State, and I've been doing that for twenty-seven years now.

This is a great career where you have an especially low attrition rate. I believe that this is such a privileged career since it gives you the ability to be out in the front lines in order to represent your country, your government, and your society. Furthermore, it is fun, and more importantly, it is a neverending stream of challenges. There are constant job changes within the service, so if you have a restless soul like I do, there are opportunities for you to satisfy that urge to push to new frontiers.

Also, the jobs I complete overseas are not tourism, they are cultural immersion. You get to become part of the society, learn the language, and essentially, become bi-cultural. At the same time, you do all of this while representing your government.

Well, my main purpose here, from the State Department's point of view, is recruiting for the State Department, and in particular, trying to get minorities interested in our career and envisioning themselves as being a Diplomat representing the United States. Our theory is that one of the best things that we can do to represent this incredibly pluralistic society is to have a diverse Foreign Service. But more generally, I am available to anyone and everyone who has an interest in the State Department's Foreign Service and Civil Service. I am also available to speak to students about internships, which I believe are valuable.

Another great responsibility I have is to inform students of all of the different programs that are out there. Two very special fellowships I would like to mention are the Rangel and Pickering Fellowships, which essentially allow a student to become a member of the Foreign Service. On top of this, we pay for two years of graduate school. There is also an undergraduate Pickering Fellowship, where we pay for the junior and senior year of school, and also for the first year of graduate school.

On top of this, I am also a visiting professor at UCLA teaching public diplomacy, which is my craft within the State Department. I've also written a couple of articles here and have given a number of speeches on the places that I know a little bit about.

I think the hardest part of my job here, to be quite honest, is to get myself in the door of some of the minority affinity groups. I am a white male and it gets a little hard. It is easier, I find, to recruit people who speak some of the critical languages that we look for. A lot of these languages are spoken by people who live right here in southern California due to the great diversity that exists here.

Absolutely, one of the things that is a terrible side effect of having a large bureaucracy is that people are "stovepiped," which means that communication runs in one channel and there is not much lateral communication even among bureaucracies that have the same goals. If these bureaucracies work together, we will become more efficient and we would not waste resources. Within my field, which is International Public Communication, I've been one of the leaders in dealing with the Department of Defense, US Agency for International Development, other branches of the State Department, and other federal agencies to work together and to ensure that there is message coordination and that we are not throwing money at the same projects and audiences.

Let's talk about the necessary steps in order to become a diplomat, and not what I did because I took the long route. I was 35 when I began working with the State Department, since I had a short television career, I taught, I worked for political campaigns, and I was also the dormitory headmaster for a while at an East Coast college. But to enter the State Department, you have to be a U.S citizen and you have to be at least 21 years old to take the test. However, you can take the test until you are 59 years old. This shows that one of the diversity elements we promote is age.

Now, to get into the Service, we have just changed the fundamental procedure in the past year. You now have to go through a registration process in order to take the exam. That process usually takes several hours since it involves filling out a very lengthy federal job application and requires you to write six short essays about yourself. After you are registered, you can take the Foreign Service Officer Test, and there have not been any changes to that test except that it is given online now. This test covers general knowledge and English expression, and it is multiple-choice. There is also a portion of the test where you are given a policy topic and you are given half an hour to write about it. After you complete this stage, you go through the next stage called the Qualifications Evaluation Panel. In this stage, there will be three experienced officers sitting with your file and if you speak one of the six "super critical" languages, then you will be asked to call the Foreign Service Institute and take a phone interview. If you make it past all of these stages, you get to go on to the final stage, which is an oral assessment. Once you get past the oral assessment, you need to get your security and medical clearances. Once you're cleared, you get placed on the job register. So it is basically a four-part process in order to get your foot in the door to become a Foreign Service Officer.

Going from East to West, they are Mandarin, Hindi, Urdu, Farsi, Dari and Arabic.

It was in college that I saw that this was a career that was good for me. I was a child of immigrants, and even on the playgrounds and in the nurseries where I grew up, there were kids from a wide variety of backgrounds. I was always negotiating cross-culturally, so it seemed natural for me to serve in the Foreign Service. Also, I went to school in the sixties, and I was not content with the policies in Vietnam, but I knew that I wanted a career in public service someday. I'm a Kennedy generation kid, so public service has always been a big deal to me.

Most people in the Foreign Service under the State Department usually stay 20-30 years. The Partnership for Public Service rates us as the sixth most popular career in government, and among women, we're rated as the first.

Well, you move around a lot, but the thing is, you are progressing up one ladder so it is very stable.

Well, I am going back to Washington for one more job. We have a mandatory retirement age of 65. However, I am not going to stop working. I like leadership roles, and I think I am a natural leader. I am planning to work in either something international, something cross cultural, and maybe something academic. I am not very sure yet, but I have several exciting jobs pending at the State Department.

The thing about this career is, you wouldn't be in it if you didn't like the work, so you don't really measure the hours you spend working. At the embassies and many other offices, we do have a forty-hour workweek. But the fact is, I am a senior executive so I work much longer, and I work at home a lot. Now, being a Diplomat in Residence, I am making phone calls and I'm answering emails seven days a week, both inside and outside of my office. Therefore, it is hard to accurately estimate how much time I dedicate to working.

In addition, I also do a lot of other things. For example, this past Saturday, I gave a four-hour preparation course for people taking the Foreign Service Oral Assessment Test, and then I went to a South Asian Student event where I gave a speech for forty-five minutes on South Asian music and how it influenced my life. After the speech, I stuck around and mingled with the students for a while.

Yes. Definitely. As, mentioned before, my position allows me to teach, recruit, give presentations, prepare people for exams, do some writing, and meet with students all at the same time.

Well, in Washington, there is such a thing as a typical day of work, but not so much here. In Washington, you'll often times have a meeting, then check your email, and then have your own staff meeting. Afterwards, you may go on calls and meet different people. Then, during lunch, it is usually time to network with different individuals. In the afternoon, you'll usually come back and write-up your meetings and decide what the next steps are in order to complete an assignment. At some offices, before the day ends, there is a "vespers" meeting, which means that everyone meets and shares what they've done for the day and plan out what to do the next day.

This is not true at all! There is quite a lot of writing that you have to do, but it's not paperwork. The kinds of writing that you actually do once you land a position within the Foreign Service is more persuasive writing. For example, you are either analyzing a situation overseas, or in my case, you're creating a program strategy to communicate a key issue to foreign audiences. You also spend a lot of time writing about how to communicate certain ideas and policies to different people. Therefore, even though you are sitting behind a desk, writing, you're usually not pushing through paperwork, but you're usually writing up a document or a program.

Well, I do a lot of presentations, regardless of what my job is. And you're always trying to maintain contact and good relations with people in your field of work. To be a good diplomat, I think that you not only need to know your colleagues on a professional level, but you also need to know them on a friendly level so that when you come to them with a specific need, they'll know that it is not only a colleague asking, but also a friend.

I would say that it is a very important aspect of my day. It is something that you absolutely need to do.

I was posted in many different countries. My first post was in Yemen and afterwards, I worked in Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, Morocco, Jordan, Japan, and Pakistan. Then I've had Washington jobs supporting diplomacy in every region I've just mentioned.

Well, we call it the assignment process, but in fact it is more like bargaining. It is like buying a rug in the Middle East. You sort of see what the selection is, then you "bid" on the countries by ranking them in terms of preferences. After this, you go out there and politic for your job by letting the bureau know that you are highly interested in a particular assignment.

You do get them very often. Currently, in this day and age, with the danger, you have to serve in a greater hardship post once every seven years. This can include a critical threat post such as Pakistan, which was where I recently came from. In these areas, you cannot take family with you due to the danger.

In Yemen, I was single. Afterwards, I met my wife. We got married in Bahrain, and she was with me at every posting through Japan and all of my Washington years. We had our child in Morocco, which was my third posting, and we all grew up in the Foreign Service. I then came home for seven years because I had an illness, and my mother was passing away. After that I went to Pakistan, where I left my family behind since my child was a senior in high school and didn't want to move. So I went out and just had the year of my life; it was one of the best experiences I have ever had.

Yes, they do. It is great if you already know a different language coming into the program, and you'll get points in the competition for it, but we do have the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia where they will teach you different languages. Through the State Department, I learned Arabic, French, Japanese, and Turkish, and I improved my Urdu.

An entry level salary today would be about $35,000 to $70,000. It depends very much on how much experience you have beforehand. Also, every year, we give "step increases" which are like raises, and they're usually two to three thousand dollars plus any federal increases across the board. For instance, if the President and Congress sign a bill for a .5 percent increase, you get the step increase and the .5 percent on top of that. I started at $17,300 a year, and now I'm making over $150,000. I'm embarrassed to say exactly what it is.

Absolutely. When you are overseas, your housing is paid for, and it is quite luxurious because you have to portray the image of coming from this great country. In addition, schooling for the kids is free overseas, and you receive a locality pay in the United States when you have to work in an expensive city such as Washington, D.C. or Los Angeles. Also, if you're in a place overseas where the cost of living is higher than Washington, you get a cost of living adjustment. And if you are posted in a hardship area, you get extra money known as "hardship pay."

The best thing I get out of this is the ability to not only live history, but to also affect it at times. In addition, I get to meet the most incredible human beings and hopefully, become their friends.

The negative aspect is that you're moving around all of the time, so it takes extra effort to keep up with your family and friends. You may get tired of moving around a lot. Also, it is a more dangerous world now than it was when I first entered in the 1980s. Although this makes the job more challenging now, I feel that it also makes the good you can do that much greater in terms of solving conflicts.

After the Cold War, we very foolishly drew down and didn't hire as much as we should. However, when Colin Powell stepped in as the Secretary of State, there was a huge hiring effort. Now, we are still incredibly short-staffed. I believe the Secretary of State is going to ask for a sizeable bump up in the 2009 budget. We are trying to respond to the shortage.

In terms of getting in, I think the competition has remained the same. I think what we don't know now, since we have so fundamentally changed the entry process in the last year, are the demographics of the examinees. Right now, we currently hire about three to four hundred Foreign Service Officers a year. I think your generation is much more public service minded, so in fact the numbers of interested candidates is going up.

Well, first of all, when we say diversity, we're not only talking about ethnic diversity, but we're also talking about age diversity and academic diversity. This means that you do not have to have a particular major since we're looking for people with all kinds of degrees. We are also looking to have economic diversity and therefore, we definitely want people who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, regardless of what their ethnicity is. We basically want a Foreign Service that looks like America.

Let me tell you a story that I think really illustrates the importance of diversity. In Pakistan, in the 1990s, the embassy used to have a United States History course. In 2006, after the big earthquake, I was approached by the head of the International Studies Department and was asked to organize such a course. With all of the ambivalence about America, Pakistani students are usually very interested in taking this course, so I decided to do it. I put a notice out in the embassy to get volunteers to help me teach the course, and I basically recruited people according to their expertise in different historical topics. There was a reception for all of those who were going to take the course, and at this time, I was really busy, so I hadn't really noticed who all had volunteered. We got to the reception, and we walked inside a hall of over 350 students. The room fell silent. I turned and asked the Professor why everyone was silent and he said that they were looking at us. I looked back, and I noticed that I had with me two African-Americans, three East Asian-Americans, two South Asian-Americans, two Latinos, two southern European types, and one blonde. The students expected all of us to look like that one blonde. At this point, the professor in the room said to me that what the students are seeing is that they can all become Americans. That is why I believe diversity is becoming so important.

I would say go for it. First of all, this is the best career because it is fun. It also gives you the ability to shape history and to observe historical events up-close. For example, I was there when the peace treaty was signed between Israel and Jordan. In fact, I organized the ceremony for the American side. I wrote the notes for President Clinton's speech to Jordan, which is the only time in history where an American President has ever spoken to an Arab Parliament. At one time, I also moderated a press conference for the late King Hussein and the Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin. Through all of these examples, you can see how much this career has to offer someone and how much room there is to grow in it. Hopefully, they also show the opportunities to implement changes that will greatly affect history.

I think having a real interest in people and a high level of patriotism would make you a good diplomat. I think that being outgoing is a very good characteristic, since you always have to network with people. Another great element is being able to put yourself in the other person's shoes. This last point is key. Empathy is so important in this career, since at one time or another, you're going to be expected to handle conflict among people who have very differing viewpoints. In these situations, you will need to learn how to see the conflict from multiple perspectives in order to efficiently solve it.

In addition to your ability to write, verbal articulation is another very important factor when it comes to hiring. This is emphasized in the Oral Assessment, which is the last part of hiring process discussed earlier. In my career, it is very important that you are able to communicate clearly and precisely, especially since you will often be engaging in a lot of cross-cultural communication where you are expected to explain and inform others of complex policies and regulations.

We are looking for a full variety of backgrounds and experiences among Americans. We have science majors, lawyers, business majors, International Relation majors, psychology majors, religion majors, and all sorts of other majors. A couple of the best Officers I work with have had PhDs in comparative literature and science, which are things that most people would not associate with diplomats.

My father used to be very big on telling me to keep doors open, and to never close off any possibilities unless you really have to in life. I was also taught to have empathy and to be compassionate. These are ideas I get from spiritual leaders, and I find them very important.