Employment Opportunities after University in UK (Oxford to Queens College Belfast) vs. US (Bowdoin, etc.)

There are dozens of colleges that are special and attract hard workers who love to learn and want to make the world a better place. DOZENS. So don’t get hung up on Bowdoin. It’s a fine institution but it is not unique in this way.

To answer your question- large US employers which have operations overseas are going to be familiar with overseas universities and their educational systems. I work in corporate recruiting and when I see an unfamiliar name of an institution- I call a colleague in that country (or the region if we don’t have an operation in that specific country) and ask. They can explain the percentage of students who graduate with honors or with specific awards; they can explain the transcript. Small employers? It starts to fall off pretty quickly. It is too hard to track the higher ed system all over the world-- especially since in some countries a “college” is really a high school, and everyone is graduating with an MA which is our equivalent of a Bachelor’s degree. You can’t expect a small company to invest the resources in a global deep dive.

Grad programs- they will have heard of UK institutions so I wouldn’t worry about that. Academia is pretty tight that way!

Diplomatic hiring is its own particular animal. Look at schools like Tufts Fletcher, Georgetown’s SFS to see how specialized these programs are. And diplomatic hires are a small percentage of the students that graduate from these programs. But the State Department hires many, many more people who are NOT diplomats-- with lots of different degrees and backgrounds.

I wouldn’t worry about the friends/contacts except that for diplomatic hires (and many other jobs in the federal government) she will need a security clearance, and the more time someone spends overseas (except in a military deployment) the more time-consuming it is to vet someone’s associates, contacts, etc.

For maximum flexibility in getting hired for “something government overseas” down the road (since she may not even be interested in the diplomatic corps once she learns what those people do), my top suggestion is to add a “strategic language” to whatever college program she does. The government has a list of strategic languages-- some you’d expect, some are surprises. But fluency can boost a person’s candidacy significantly. And it opens up a lot of cool roles that don’t get a lot of attention but are mission-critical. (someone is translating those encrypted messages from North Korea about their nuclear testing program, right?)

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