Foreign Service Oral Assessment

Today was the big day for me! I took the metro into the District and tried hard to put my best foot forward.

The first part of the FSOA was a group role-playing exercise, in which the object was not to "win" the discussion but to show good teamwork and help to achieve consensus. I was inspired in that part and confident that I had aced it. Much of the credit for my performance here goes to a local group of candidates from an online forum who met several times to practice the Group Exercise and to critique one another's responses.

Next was the written exercise, which I'd only practiced once, and had done a good job on - in twice the allotted time. In the real one, I managed to finish (just! there were literally three seconds between my last keystroke and the ending buzzer), but I was pretty sure it could have been a lot better - one of the key traits you're supposed to show in that section is mathematical/analytical ability, and I had spent so much time on the interpersonal aspects of the question that I just kind of shoved that bit into a single sentence.

Finally there was a standard interview-type section; I tried to put the other two parts behind me and come into that fresh, but I really had no idea how I'd done. I always enjoy talking about myself, but I'm not good at judging how well I manage to present my qualifications in doing so.

So at the end I had no idea what kind of score I might have gotten. Fortunately, you get your results the day of the FSOA. There was a lot of waiting (which would have been hideous, had not the other candidates been talking and joking to hide the fact that they were just as tense as I was) while other people got called out one by one, and then finally the assessors identified the remaining five candidates as those who had passed. To my amazement, I was one of them! They should have taken pictures of our faces at that moment. From that point, I started allowing myself to think of this as an actual real possibility.

After being congratulated on passing, we submitted a form SF-86 which we had previously completed online. This document compiles the huge amount of background information needed in the investigation to grant Top Secret security clearance. We were also given a lot of instructions on the next steps, including the security and medical clearances that we'll need to get. Finally, after being fingerprinted, I was released. Before getting on the Metro to come home, I made an important phone call to Bongsu.

Overall, I thought the day was a lot of fun. The other candidates were an amazing group of people, and there were opportunities during the day to talk to some of them about their experiences in the Peace Corps, journalism, the military, academia, and the private sector. The best part, of course, was the end.