All Foreign Service Candidates bring a Statement of Interest (SOI) to the Foreign Service Oral Assessment, and it’s read by the examiners who asses the Structured Interview (at the very least – I don’t know who else reads it). No one knows for sure the guidelines for the SOI other than “Please us the space [...]

In the first half of this loooooong tutorial-like string of advice, I wrote about studying as a group. The value of practicing with your group is priceless, so please make sure you do it. However, there’s plenty of preparation you can do as an individual. This post is going to focus on the Case Management [...]

Part II will be primarily about how I prepared on my own, but this post is devoted to how my group studied and, most importantly, practiced together. A little over a year ago, I started regularly meeting in the MLK Library with my FSOA study group. An alternate title for this post would be “Hooray [...]

This post is going to be long, but the day was pretty long too.

When I went to bed on Sunday night it was snowing lightly and I was worried that the government might close and I would have to reschedule for a much later date. At about 3am, someone started snow blowing the [...]

I met with my FSOA study group last night – seems like a good group. We’re all pretty focused and driven. I just hope I didn’t step on any toes by sometimes taking the lead in the conversation. I suppose working on the speaking and leadership skills should begin sooner rather than later.

I’ll going [...]