1. Could you introduce yourself to us?

I'm Jade, a New Jersey native. I attended Drexel from 2019 to 2024, and I majored in criminology and justice studies. My focus was on justice informatics, which is just a fancy way of saying crime statistics and predictive analysis. I also had a minor in Asian studies. While I was at Drexel, I studied abroad in South Korea in the fall quarter of 2021 through the Gilman program, which is a study abroad scholarship program sponsored by the U.S. Department of State. I also did a Warren scholarship to Taiwan to study Mandarin. In between coming back from Taiwan and being in the foreign service, I did two years of grad school at John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), earning a master’s in international relations. On paper, I had a regional expertise in the Middle East and Africa, and a functional concentration in governance, politics, and society, and security, strategy, and statecraft. But I just sort of combine those and call it geopolitics, conflict security, and governance.

2. What first drew you to criminology and justice studies at Drexel, and how did your interests evolve during your time here?

I think I was always interested in the psychology behind crime. I have a close family member who dealt with some mental health issues, and they had some interactions with the justice system, so that started my interest early on. As I grew up, I did a lot of courses and programs that were related to forensics and forensic science because I thought that’s what I would end up doing. I was in a forensics camp after my freshman year of high school, and I ended up doing classes in forensic psychology, criminal and civil law, and forensic science, and other stuff of that nature. I find people and why they do things so interesting and being able to sort of layer that with different social institutions like health and education and other systems that affect your everyday life, that really interests me.

Once it came time to pick my functional concentration, informatics felt new and interesting, and justice informatics felt like that would put me where I wanted to be, which I found was sort of in that statistics space. For my Warren program, I said that I wanted to fulfill my service requirement by working with the Bureau of Justice Statistics within the Department of Justice.

3. Looking back, which parts of your Drexel education have been most valuable in preparing you for your work in the Foreign Service?

It’s interesting because working in foreign service involves a lot of international diplomacy and foreign affairs, and I had not studied anything like that at Drexel. If there is something at Drexel that helped me, it was my study abroad experiences and the classes I took during the study abroad because that contributed to my language competencies. I ended up learning Korean and Chinese and when I went abroad, I was interacting with different cultures and I got to learn about different Korean cultures and law, and when I did Chinese, I was learning about different music. My Drexel education prepared me to be in this global, international space where you’re interacting with different countries.

4. You now work on geopolitics, governance and conflict security. How did your academic interests at Drexel lead you toward international affairs?

I always really liked history, and I was always a political person myself. I think when it came to domestic issues in the U.S., like, in criminology, a lot of my earlier interest was on the justice system and how that affected minority groups. So, there was always a political nexus with my work, but it didn’t necessarily have that connective tissue with international affairs.

When I first started studying international relations at SAIS, my perspective was very people-centered on how political institutions and how state behavior trickles down to ordinary people. This isn’t necessarily the wrong lens to look at international affairs or politics, but it’s also not necessarily the dominating one. Drexel taught me how to be very qualitative and how to analyze what’s going on in the world and how policy affects people at the lowest level. I think Drexel still fostered that historical interest that I had and how it kept me in proximity to foreign policy and foreign affairs and what’s happening politically, but I sharpened the analytical frameworks that I used by going to grad school, which was a super hard learning curve.

5. What does a typical day look like for you as a Foreign Service officer, and what has surprised you most about the work?

Right now, it’s a lot of training, because I've just been onboarded, and I finished orientation about two weeks ago. A typical day just looks like a lot of functional training about the department. Then in a couple weeks, I'll start language training for Amharic, the national language in Ethiopia spoken by about 40 million people there. After I finish language training, I go through another segment of just consular training because I'm a consular planning officer, which means I work in the embassy section that deals with visas and American citizen services. Once I get over there, a typical day will be a lot of visas, and a lot of helping American citizens that are in crisis who have administrative needs they want to take care of. Many officers that are going to a place where they don’t speak the language are in language training for a long time.

6. Working in geopolitics and conflict security often involves complex problems with no easy answers. How have you learned to navigate those situations?

I’ve found that what makes analyzing different geopolitical issues and conflicts a little easier is having all the information and facts about that situation in your pocket and then having a certain frame that you like to analyze things from. I think that at the very base level, it’s always the three different schools of thought: realism, liberalism, constructivism. That helps situate your thoughts and ideas about why something is happening. It’s easier to understand why people are doing what they’re doing. Empathy still has a space, but it’s more like, what are people’s interests and what are their stakes in this conflict, and what do they have to gain from this.

The thing about international relations is that a lot of it is about resources, about the things people want claim over. Asking why are people interested in this space, this specific plot of land, this specific resource, and what do they have to gain from quarreling over it? That makes analyzing geopolitics easier, but I'm still getting used to applying the correct analytical frame.

7. Your career path has taken you from criminology and justice studies to international diplomacy. What advice would you give students who aren’t sure where their degree will take them?

Just take that leap of faith. If you're not going down the path that you thought that you were, it’s okay. Embracing uncertainty and the unknown is the best thing to do because you never know where life is going to take you.

I had no idea I was going to be in the U.S. Foreign Service, or that I would be a diplomat. It wasn’t even on my radar, but it was because there were so many people at Drexel that saw something in me before I saw something in myself. There are tons of people that I have come across at Drexel that have helped me with my essays, my grad school applications, getting into these fellowship programs that would bet everything on me. They had the utmost confidence in me, and they’ve always supported whatever direction I was going into. I found that letting go has been what’s helped me the most. I sort of ended up on the opposite end of the government area, but I'm happy.

I think if you are feeling a little uncertain about where your major is taking you, just do what feels right, because life will take you somewhere. Life will always veer off course, so of course, build in some structure. I think a lot of people don’t like when there’s no plan, no security around the unknown, but that might be the best option for you, just embracing what you don’t know yet.