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.