SOS, Medical Emergencies, and Gap Days

This week I had my mandatory two-day "Security Overseas Seminar", thanks to my own ingenuity. I had noticed on my training schedule that I had only one class scheduled this week (the equally mandatory "Medical Emergencies at Post" on Wednesday). Meanwhile, in July I had a couple of weeks free before the SOS course. So I figured out with the online course catalog that SOS was also being offered this week, on days when I happened to have a gap in my training, and I reasoned that if I could move the course up then I could leave for post a whole two weeks earlier.

So I e-mailed my CDO to ask about doing that, and it is a very good thing I did, too, as it eventually led to the discovery that I am NOT actually expected to arrive in Copenhagen as soon as my training is over; instead, they are still expecting me in October as originally listed on our bid list. The July arrival date on my training documentation was just there because whoever put that schedule together was not used to having any time in the pre-departure schedule not filled with training (apparently something that is only recently becoming fairly common). So how does one fill that time? The answer is a thing called a "bridge assignment", where I get to do actual work at the State Department in DC! My excitement at this prospect immediately dispelled any annoyance at having my expectations changed. Plus, I'm actually happy that we have more time in the States to get things done like obtaining my diplomatic passport and working on Bongsu's naturalization.

The end result was that I did indeed move the SOS course up to this week, not so we could leave earlier, but so I could start the bridge assignment earlier. SOS itself was alright; a lot of it had already been covered in A-100 but it is quite important stuff, even for a peaceful place like Denmark, so it was good to go over it again. Same deal with the Medical Emergencies training.

After getting those out of the way early in the week, I still had two more gap days. I had more than enough non-scheduled work to fill Thursday and Friday quite productively. I re-took the speaking part of my German test, which I had asked to be re-graded. I ended up a full level higher than the original score, so I was right in thinking that the first go-around had been mis-graded. I continued to research Denmark and Embassy Copenhagen. I finished a variety of small administrative tasks, including the continuing saga of putting together Bongsu's immigration application. I got a chance to go to the EUR/NB (European Bureau, Office of Nordic and Baltic Affairs) at Main State to meet with the Denmark/Iceland desk officer and (very briefly) the office director. And I spent considerable time continuing to work on setting up those bridge assignments.

Okay, the bridge assignments. When my CDO and I first figured out that I would need to do them, he suggested that I give some idea of where I'd like to work to the person in charge of setting them up. I did that, and she responded that she would get to me as soon as she finished some other cases who would be starting their bridges sooner than I. That sounded good, but I also went ahead and contacted some people I knew in the bureaus where I was most interested in working (the desk officer at EUR/NB and a colleague of our class mentor Amb. Polt in "H", the Bureau of Legislative Affairs). When they responded positively, I forwarded those responses to the person setting up the bridges. I think she may have been a bit defensive, possibly seeing me as overly helpful. It definitely makes sense that their office should be in charge of these things, but it seems an important part of FS culture is "lobbying" for positions that one wants, and I did not especially want to end up in a bridge assignment unrelated to my current or future job goals just because I was being lazy. In the end, I think I struck about the right balance between being proactive and deferring to those whose job it is to put these things together. If I erred on one side, it was probably to take charge of the process too much, but I did work hard always to be polite, to keep all relevant parties informed at every stage, and to recognize their authority -- and in the end, I have ended up with the exact assignments I'm most interested in, so take from that whatever lesson you will.

Europe Intensive Area Studies

With generalist orientation over, we in the 144th plunged right in to our "functional training" (training for the actual posts we're going to). On April 20 I started with Europe Intensive Area Studies, a very cool 2-week course that covers the whole continent of Europe. Two other members of my A-100 class were also in the class. Although I've heard around FSI that some of these two-week intensive area studies courses can be hard to sit through, with lots of information that's hard to relate to the specific place you're going to, in our case we were lucky to have instructors who did a great job of tying things together. For example, we had two whole days just on the Balkans, and I don't think any of us in the course are actually heading to a Balkan country, but the context and application to our own countries (for example, as a flashpoint of EU foreign policy) was very well done. Another highlight of the course was our visit to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, where we learned about a hugely significant event in twentieth-century European history and met with a young Austrian man who is working there as an alternative to mandatory military service. It wasn't all history, though; we learned about topics from the institutional structure of the European Union to the working of the welfare state in countries with a strong social safety net to the political future of countries like Turkey and Ukraine.