<p>S is a sophomore in college, political science major interested in international affairs. We looked briefly at the U.S. Foreign Service exam. If I understand correctly, the pass rate for the written exam is ~10% and the oral exam ~20%. That seems pretty discouraging. Has anyone had experience trying to get in the foreign Service?</p>
<p>My brother-in-law tried. He did fine on the written exam but flunked the oral. They set up a scenario and he was asked what to do. He did everything right, but get the dead body flown back to the US. My father was a foreign service officer, but he took the exams many eons ago.</p>
<p>It used to be – some 20 years ago – that the Foreign Service comprised mostly of Ivy League grads and those from similar-caliber schools. And yes, the test is tough. My husband took the exam once - he was a PhD from a world-class university, though in a field only somewhat related - and flunked. He said even if he had spent A LOT of time preparing for it (which he didn’t) he didn’t think he’d have passed it. </p>
<p>That said, people DO pass the exams and get in - your S could be among them.</p>
<p>I would look at the pass rate for college grads which I believe is even lower. When S1, an honors grad in international politics, took it he got the impression that the only real people they were interested in were people with advance degrees, specific technical experience or languages and/or more international experience. There are a lot of poli scis out there and they weed them out pretty ruthlessly.</p>
<p>I think the OP’s child should give it a whirl. He may not pass but it will teach him what he does not know…which can be very important. There are lots of jobs where his degree will be of value beside the USFS, many of them in government which needs all the good people it can find.</p>
<p>I took the exam THREE times (25 years ago). Each time I passed all of the subject areas (only needed to pass three out of five I think) and flunked the English portion! To this day, I have absolutely no clue how this would be possible. English is my best subject. I scored in the 99th percentile on SAT and GRE English tests, never made anything but an A in college or grad school in any subject, but always found any course with a heavy writing component to be my favorite, etc. They wouldn’t give you the test back, so you can’t see what answer they are expecting. I could only conclude I wasn’t “political enough” in my responses, but after I failed the first time, I tried different approaches the next two times, because I was just so flabbergasted. It obviously didn’t work.</p>
<p>About five years after I took the test, there was some class action lawsuit that decided the test was discriminatory against women, so every woman who had taken the test during years x-y (which included me) were deemed to have automatically passed the written portion. By that time I had married a man who wasn’t willing to give up his job to go live overseas, so I didn’t pursue the orals. </p>
<p>Another option would be for your son to explore jobs with USAID, although that is competitive as well. I tried to get hired by USAID after flunking the foreign service exam and had no luck with that organization either. They reportedly wanted people coming out of the Peace Corps (which I was ineligible to join due to prior military experience in an intelligence field) or people with a technical background. I had an undergraduate degree in Middle Eastern Studies, Masters in Public Administration, Arabic language skills, significant overseas experience in the military, plus a summer internship in Mauritania with the state department, all of which was considered ho-hum in the absence of a technical degree like engineering. That feedback led me to take a job in finance with the specific goal of gaining experience that would be appealing for a budget officer position with AID. (Pretty ridiculous that a high paying Wall St. job was easier to get than one of these government jobs in a developing African country.) However, I got married after taking the finance job and never did reapply to AID because of H.</p>
<p>I think there is an element of luck in getting that first job. My oldest son wants to work overseas and is getting his undergraduate degree in engineering, having learned from my mistakes!</p>
<p>Nearly 30 years ago I took this exam, as did another friend. Neither of us passed the written exam. Both of us ended up going to law school. My then college advisor, who specialized in international government told me that the people that they picked had significant foreign experience (which neither of us had.) Also I would also think that today, it would require experience in countries other than western and central europe to distinguish oneself, as well as multiple language expertise. </p>
<p>As to theAnalyst above, imo, if you were male it would have been a shoo in,based on your experience.</p>
<p>Writing the above post made me angry all over again and it just occurred to me that maybe I didn’t pass the foreign service exam or get into USAID because there actually was discrimination against women back then. Maybe it was as simple as them seeing a female name and marking the test as failed. I never believed that at the time, lawsuit notwithstanding, and always wondered how it would be possible to skew an English test to be discriminatory against women. I think I was imagining lots of sports trivia questions or something.</p>
<p>TheAnalyst: Perhaps the problem wasn’t political or sexual-political. Perhaps your answers just made too much sense! Your sentence structure is clear, your declarative sentences say what you mean without ambiguity, and your words don’t suffer from pathological gigantism. Obviously, therefore, you weren’t not qualified for the Foreign Service!</p>
<p>To The Analyst: The same thing happened to me…I was told I missed passing by one point. Then some years later, I was included in the class action lawsuit on behalf of women who may have been discriminated against.
By that time, I had a new baby and didn’t pursue it. It was my dream job at the time.</p>
<p>I was attending grad school when I took the test…it was given on our campus. (It’s a school for MBAs in international business, so there were lots of students who routinely signed up to take the test.) I never heard of one woman out of my class of test-takers at the time who DID pass. That said, I didn’t talk to everyone…this was just a rumor. There were probably about 30of us taking it at one sitting and probably only about 35% were women.</p>
<p>The exam wasn’t exactly one I found you could study much for. As I recall, what was fascinating about the test was that it would ask you about classical music to architecture to pop culture to math to history. It seemed that someone with a wide range of experience/education was best suited. I found that my years of piano lessons finally paid off as did the art history classes I’d taken.</p>
<p>There were a several guys I knew who passed the written and only one who went on to pass the orals and ultimately became a Foreign Service Officer. He was a history undergrad.</p>
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<p>Still true today. The vast majority of US work overseas is based on giving aid, such as agriculture, water, health care (aids), energy (oil, gas, nuke), telecomunications, and the like. Thus, technical specialists are needed, as well as international econ majors. Generalists (International relations/poli sci grads) are too numerous to be highly sought.</p>
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<p>Not much changed, there, either. Besides Wall Street and Big Law, the federal Government is another ‘industry’ where pedigree matters, a LOT.</p>
<p>Someone told me years ago that one of the best ways to pass the test is to have read Time or Newsweek cover to cover for a number of years, to ensure good current knowledge of the details and breadth of American culture. </p>
<p>Of the two people I know in AID, one had long experience with NGOs, as well as a forestry degree, and the other works in agriculture.</p>
<p>Disagree that Ivys are the path to entry to the foreign service. That cultural change happened a long time ago. If you get a chance look at the decals of the cars parked at the Foreign Service Institute for State Department training. You actually don’t see many for Yale, Harvard or Princeton, etc.</p>
<p>Some of the above postings are correct that technical skills can get you in the door, mainly in diplomatic security and information technology.</p>
<p>My H took the written foreign service exam twice and passed it both times, but wasn’t selected after the interview portion. (Does that mean he “failed” it?) He described it as being a scenario in which he was asked to run through an in-box–consular, I think–and deal with the contents.</p>
<p>I didn’t know him then, so my description may be faulty.</p>
<p>He was a returned Peace Corps volunteer, not any Ivy grad. (The one person I’ve ever known who had a career in the state dept was a Penn grad.)</p>
<p>I recently passed the FS Oral Assessment, so I can comment a little bit on the hiring process. </p>
<p>What I’ve heard from sleuthing online and talking w/ a State Dept Diplomat in Residence at my college, the pass rate for the written exam is about 40%. If you pass the written exam, you go to the Qualifications Evaluation Panel, where they look at your written exam scores, resume information, and answers to short essay questions. About half the people who get to the QEP (so 20% of FSWE takers), are invited to the Oral Assessment. The pass rate for the Oral Assessment has typically ranged from 20%-30%. So, somewhere around 4-6% of the people who take the FSWE ultimately pass the Oral Assessment. </p>
<p>The FSWE consists of a general knowledge section, a biographical section, an English expression section, and an essay. The general knowledge section is pretty broad and not really easy to study for, although having a good understanding of how the US government works is probably a good idea. The bio section is also something that you can’t really study for, but it’s there. The English expression is kind of similar to some standardized tests, where there’s a sentence or a paragraph with different wording or punctuation options and you choose which of the answers is the most accurate. The essay section is usually on some sort of public policy topic, although it may not have any international aspect.</p>
<p>The Oral Assessment consists of 3 sections. First, is the group exercise. You will work with 3-5 other candidates to determine how an American Embassy in a fictional country to allocate resources. The other sections are the structured interview and the case management section. In the SI, you will have some regular interview-type questions, some hypotheticals (you have X job in the Embassy and A, B, and C have happened, what do you do?), and some questions based on the 13 dimensions the State Dept uses to evaluate candidates. The 13 dimensions can be found on the State Dept website. In the case management section, you’ll get about 30 pages of e-mails, memos, and other documents from various Embassy officials in a fictional country. You will have some sort of tasking to write a memo drawn on what’s stated in those documents in 90 minutes. </p>
<p>After you pass the Oral Assessment, then they start the security and medical clearance process. If all of that goes well and you get your clearances, then you go on the register for the career track you selected when you registered for the FSWE, based on your score from the Oral Assessment plus any bonus points you get for passing a language exam or being a veteran. You can stay on the register for up to 18 months. There have usually been 5 or 6 training classes a year (although this will likely change due to adding a lot of new FSO positions in the next few years) for new FSOs and in order to fill the class, they start with the people with the highest scores and then go down the list. If you know that you are not available until a certain point, you can go on a sort of do not call list.</p>
<p>I hope this clarifies the process a little bit. Incidentally, I have spoken with three Diplomats in Residence, who are State Dept employees (usually Ambassadors) assigned to various universities across the country, and all of them had their college degrees from state universities (Texas, Colorado, and Virginia).</p>
<p>My H’s cousin is married to a career diplomat in the Foreign Service. She is fluent in both Arabic and Spanish. It may be an exciting career for the younger set but she is close to retirement and she had to petition to remain in this country for her final 2 years because as a Foreign Service Diplomat, you cannot stay at a US based post longer than 5 years consecutively. In addition, if her petition wasn’t approved, she was to be assigned to a hardship post, in spite of her seniority- 38 years in the Foreign Service.</p>