Making it in DC and BeyondWashington DC, July 14, 2015

Moderator: Negar Razavi: social anthropologist, PS21 global fellowAli Wyne: member of the adjunct faculty, RAND CorporationKathryn Floyd: visiting lecturer, Department of government, College of William & MaryDarya Pilram: field anthropologist/social scientist with US Military. Current lecturer at University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies, Fort LeavenworthSarah Arkin: senior policy adviser to Congresswoman Debbie Wasseman Schultz

Negar Razavi: No one will judge you but we are being live streamed right now, so if there are any juicy bits, you can see it again, you can watch it on YouTube. We're also going with the hash tag FPinDC if you want to follow the conversation. I want to make this rather informal because I think this is a really right topic and I think I would want to hear more from you guys and I think the speakers really want to hear your questions as well. We have four people who have made it in various ways at home and they're probably not that much older than you guys so they can give you up-to-date information and are not talking about four decades ago on how to make it in Washington, this is very recent information.

So just very briefly I am going to tell you their name their titles and then we're going to jump into Q&A. So right to my left is Sarah Arkin, senior policy adviser to Congresswoman Debbie Wasseman Schultz where she works on foreign policy, health policy, etc. Now we have Ali who is an adjunct faculty at RAND and soon to be graduate student at Harvard, congratulations. Then we have Kay who is a dissertation PhD student in strategic studies and is currently a lecturer at William and Mary. Her dissertation focuses on youth violence and homegrown terrorism in the US. Then I have Darya Pilram who is a field social scientist teaching applied critical thinking and red teaming(?), which I have no idea what that means so you’re going to have to explain it, at University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies at Fort Leavenworth and she's here in DC teaching a class at the Pentagon as well.

So I want to start with Kay because I get a lot of questions from young people about going to PhD programs. I think when you immediately graduate from undergrad there's a scary feeling of not being

within an academic environment and a lot of people panic and say, “Should I immediately be going into graduate school,” and sometimes people getting a Masters say, “Do I need to be going getting a PhD and so we have somebody who has pursued that path who is also the other things, including consulting and some policy work. Can you tell us why he chose to get a PhD in and what you’re hoping to do with it?

Kay Floyd: Well, the choice to get a PhD and have this somewhat asymmetrical career trajectory is a lesson of being haphazard at best. I did go fairly straight away to my master's degree and then I went to work for the International Institute for Strategic Studies for a number of years doing a mix between research and strategic communications on some of the international conferences and it was through one of those really big conferences that I got to know a lot of reputable scholars in the terrorism radicalization communities and they were familiar with both my academic work and my general interest and we just got to know each other in a networking type capacity. I was at the Asia security summit in 2008 where someone that I very much respected in the field sat down and asked me, “Have you ever thought about getting a PhD?” and I said no, and probably did some awkward giggle thing because I’m deeply honest with you when it comes to my personal stories. So I went back to think about it, sat down, and decide, you know what, I;m going to go for it; I’m going to take this challenge that is ahead of me. I sat down and applied. It’s a very international, hybrid program that's run through Rajaratnam School of International Studies so it's phenomenal in the sense that they bring in Professor Bruce Hoffman from Georgetown University to teach about terrorism and bring in the leading experts on maritime security from King's College London. It’s that model if you want an international education, let's bring in all those people rather than see who’s around or who can we find to recruit? I suppose one of the most honest answers to your question about why I initially, and I’m going to say initially, chose to pursue a PhD is they offered me a full ride and said that you get live in Paris but it afforded me the opportunity to stay very involved in my studies and academic interests and it opened the door. To teaching at a top university like the College of William and Mary, which really wasn't part of the plan 21 or 22. I did not fancy myself to be an academic but it’s been phenomenal because I can keep a hand in consulting, because public education doesn’t pay that well, and continue with my research interests and try to figure out what is going to happen…

Razavi: Great, well I’m going to switch to Ali now. You're heading into graduate training at this point but you’ve done policy research at a number of different institutions and think tanks and now with Iran, so what skills did you need and what skills did you develop in the course of working at these various organizations?

Ali Wyne: I think one is the ability to synthesize information quickly and I think I learned this particular skill because I spent two and a half, three years, at the Development Center for International Affairs?? You could call it a think tank, I guess, but it’s a research hub at the Kennedy School and as part time job when I came in, I came with certain topics that I knew about such as China-US relations in particular but a big art of the job was becoming an expert, so to speak, that I had no prior knowledge and so a very typical assignment would be, and I imagine we all had this experience in different capacities, but the assignment was you get a phone call from the boss that goes “Ali, I need you to put together a memo in

light of today’s deal, a timeline on nuclear diplomacy with Iran, what are the pitfalls, what are the major achievements.”

So you have to get up to speed very quickly and so I think the ability to synthesize information very quickly and also the ability, when you’re approaching new terrain, where do you get started or how do you get started? What I try to do if I am approaching a topic, particularly on a crunch time, first, what are the basic facts and go to Wikipedia. I know it has a bad rap, but going to Wikipedia just for the basic facts and going to other think tank institutes that have primers on topics I’m not aware of and they give you the basic facts. Step two is who are the authoritative voices on this topic and looking at what they have to say? Three, building off of that, what is the state of the debate on the topic and I think that one you get your basic facts, look at the authoritative voices are you looking to the state of debate is then at least it gets you to the point where you can have an intelligent conversation. It doesn’t make you an expert but it would allow you to at least respond to what my boss was saying. I think the ability to synthesize information can make you an expert, so-to-speak, quickly.a and experts as even an issue quickly

I think it's very important to be able to look at the whole spectrum of arguments in an issue. Sometimes you can take that to the extreme such that when someone asks what your own opinion is, and your instinct is to say, “Well, there are ten different sides to this issue and I’m not really sure which one is really my own preference.” I think it is important now, particularly in DC where debates are so much more polarized and ideological and a lot of people say my argument is right and its self-evidently correct and there’s no other way about it. I think the ability, if you want to engage in a healthy and constructive policy debate, to be able to understand why people who are looking at the same data can render very different judgments. So why don’t I just leave it at that and say those are just a few skills.

Razavi: So related to that I'm going to go next to Darya. There's a push for quantification data nowadays. You see a lot of push in graduate school to be able to understand big data sets and qualitative data has sort of been pushed to the side. So I'm curious, as a qualitative researcher, how you are able to carve a space for yourself and what is the value of doing embedded field research with the military?

Darya Pilram: Qualitative research is really is really interesting to me because it’s my nexus of natural curiosity of how things work and quantitative tells you what's going on. It can give you trends of things moving up, down, and around. Qualitative is boots on the grounds: why is this happening? Why are the numbers going up? Why are they going down? Where are the connections? Where can you look for gaps in the system and opportunities throughout that system to make positive change or effects? What can you monitor for negative effects? I absolutely love it because it’s messy. You have to be comfortable with messy, chaotic data. You’re dealing with people and people tell you all sorts of stuff. You have to be willing you go out there and get the interviews, analyze patterns, look for patterns, and be naturally curious about why that’s happening.

Working with the military, it wasn’t my natural inclination. I was a State Department intern in college, so diplomacy and soft power were really big when I was a senior in college. The thing about moving into the defense realm for me was finding opportunities where you could find insights to bring to the table, data-driven, decision-making processes. At the time when I was an intern at the State Department, soft power was just coming into play in a big way. I’m from San Francisco but I came out here and was in the Bush administration, which in itself was a cultural playground for me. When I went back to school, we had a diplomat in residence, so I tried to stick to the State Department route, found out we had a local diplomat resident, checked him out, and he was running a one credit course on rewriting the national security strategy. I rewrote it from a soft power standpoint and just fell in love with this opportunity to bring those types of insights into diplomacy and the security realm

When he comes the military, the only thing I love about it that it’s highly regimented and very somewhat static system depending on which parts and which branches of the military you’re working in. Why do I like that as a qualitative researcher? Because I love navigating through those messy environments. So when you have a static, bureaucratic organization, if you're happy the chaos, unknowns, and pushing boundaries, then you know where the boundaries and you know how to start navigating your way through that. The military really appreciates having those insights and alternate perspectives which is really where I find myself today.

Razavi: Sarah, just as a background I know Sarah pretty well. I may give some insight, tidbits, about her but you [Sarah] lived in the Middle East and worked as a journalist and photojournalist. You worked at state and now you’re on the Hill. How did your experiences abroad, in the field, help you in the policy world?

Sarah Arkin: So the first thing I always tell people who want to get into foreign policy who are coming right out of undergraduate is that there is nothing that can substitute field experience. I say this jokingly, but I don’t mean studying abroad for a semester, which I did and it was really fun. Having substantive experience abroad is something you cannot replicate anywhere else. I think it has really informed my ability to take all of the stuff that I’ve had subsequent… So right after college, I got a fellowship and was working as a photojournalist in Israel and the West Bank. I then came back and was doing some journalism in Southern Virginia, which also counts as field experience in that you’re on the ground, engaging with people and not sitting in a think tank or a university. Then in 2012, I had a foreign fellowship and I was studying Arabic in Cairo and happened to be there during a very tumultuous and interesting time. I also was an intern at the State Department and my experience abroad definitely helped me get that internship in the first place.

Being in the Civil Service at the State Department, you don't have the opportunity to go abroad and get different postings like Foreign Service does. Unlike many civil servants I had more experience abroad coming back and it was really useful really and insightful and even now in my job where I'm not directly in the foreign policy community in the same way, even just the two instances that I have living in the Middle East set me apart from a lot of people who work in the space that I do. It's really insightful and

really helpful when I do engage with the policy heavy community that really now doesn't look at me as someone very policy oriented. I do have that experience abroad and I do come with these a little more gravitas when I’m talking about these issues. There are a lot of different ways you can do that; starting to teach English abroad and working for something from that.

Razavi: Hopefully, when you guys are asking questions, you can get more specific about each one of their experiences. But I wanted that to be them laying out their experiences rather than reading off your bios. I think that was much more helpful. So now going into my more substantive questions, and I do want to emphasize that each of these individuals is speaking on behalf themselves as individuals and are not representing any institutions or public officials. So I wanted to ask you guys this rather counter-intuitive question at an event called “Making it in DC,” can you tell us an instance where you failed and what you learned from that experience. I think a lot of times, people are daunted by these people who are super successful, amazing, and wonderful and you think everything was easy for them, but I think it's very helpful and honest to talk about instances where you were not successful. We can start with Ali.

Wyne: I think it's really important question. There are so many times when I didn’t make it that I could choose from that it’s hard to choose. We were talking about one earlier and I find it has some communal value so I’ll share that. It’s also illustrative of the fact that, one, when you look at someone’s resume, there isn’t a section about your failures. You should remember when you look at people’s resumes, when you look at their biographies, omitted from those are many detours, many wrong turns, or many instances when things didn’t go right. Also, increasingly, peoples’ paths are not linear. People go from one sector to another, they go from one profession to another. So again, there is certainly something to recommend in having a general sense in where you want to go but you can also get too rigid and say, “I have to get this position or I have to get this internship.”

Anyhow, I'll go back to attack my college days and this was when I had a sense that I wanted to go into the think tank community and I was toying with the idea of going into academia as well. At the time, I wasn’t actually applying to think tanks, I was applying to consulting and finance firms, not because I had any background in consulting or financing, but because many of my friends were landing internships at the big companies—McKinsey, Baine, BCD—and I wanted to be cool like one of my friends. This is my senior year and I had come back from a research stint and I recently interned at the Developer Center and I didn’t actually appreciate how important that connection and brief internship my junior year summer would be because that’s where I ended up working full-time a couple of years later.

So I came back my senior year, and you know, you’re talking with people about what you did that summer and I heard through the grapevine that an acquaintance of mine landed a very coveted internship at DE Shaw. I still don’t know exactly what DE Shaw does, and this is part of the lesson because when you apply, you should have a sense of what the company actually does. It’s basically for people who are extremely quantitative and very much aware of the intersection finance and technology. So I go to the DE Shaw website and I submit my resume and much to my surprise I get an email back saying we’d like to interview you on the phone. I do the phone interview and then I was very stunned. I

got a call from the same recruiter saying we’d like for you to come up to Manhattan and interview with us and I thought this was going way better than I would expect. In retrospect, my suspicion for why they picked me for an interview is not because they thought I was qualified, they were intrigued by someone who was so woefully unqualified was applying.

I go up to Manhattan, very excited for this interview—I thought it was going to be an interview, but it was actually eight interviews—and the first interview starts off fine, you know, “Ali, tell me about your background, what did you study in college? What kind of activities do you do?” It was going fine and at the end of the interview, the interviewer said, “We have a couple minutes left, can you tell me how many cars there are in the world?” It’s one of those brain teasers. He gave a marker and a whiteboard and told me to show him my thinking. Sometimes you just fake it until you make it if there’s utter terror in your heart but you want to show confidence and I said “Sure” with a big grin on my face and I took the marker and drew a few cars on the whiteboard. It was a disaster.

The next interviewer, we had a shorter conversation. He asked me, “Ali, do you even know what DE Shaw does?” The night before I had gone to DE Shaw’s About Us page and I memorized the mission statement and I just spat it out verbatim and he said, “Well, I know that, it’s on our About Us page. What can you explain to me what that means?” So basically, it was comically disastrous but at least for me it had a useful lesson. Sometimes having an interview experience that bad is actually very clarifying and I remember coming out of there thinking, “You know, what am I doing here? I don’t know what the company does and I’m here for the wrong reasons. I applied to DE Shaw, not because I even know what the company does or am genuinely invested in the work that they do, but because I thought it would be a cool addition to my resume.” It was so bad that it was actually clarifying and said to myself that from now on, if I apply for a job or internship, you have to like what you do. You have to be passionate about you do. There are some people who can contrive passion for a little bit longer but I’m one of these people if I’m not really engaged by what I’m doing, I can maybe do it for a few days.

It was very useful to me in that from that point on, I’m going to apply to think tanks, policy type positions, things that I’m genuinely interested in and I’m passionate about the work, and we’ll see where that goes. I gave that example because the day that interview happened, it was really demoralizing but it was very clarifying because I actually look at that experience in retrospect that happened in 2008 and think that it was actually very pivotal for me in terms of saying that I definitely won’t go down this route, I’m going to go down this route. It was a bad experience that day, but I think it actually instructive.

Arkin: My senior year of college, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do. I decided that applying to the Master’s Program was the best solution and I put all this time, I got all these recommendations, and I went to the interview. During the interview, she asked me a very simple question, “What do you want to do and why is this degree going to help you?” I came up with something on the spot but I came out of the interview like, “I don’t know!” I didn’t get in and it was great because it was the same sort of

thing where I shouldn’t have gotten in and I didn’t know what I was going to get out of that and it made me refocus.

I have this memory in Kindergarten and tearing this children’s book author and this is stuck with me. He brought acceptance letters of all the books he had written, which were about five, and then he pulled out a stack of papers which were rejection letters. That has stuck with me through adulthood, now, and I feel that the electronic version of that is going through your Gmail and going through all your job applications that you sent and they’re all sent from me with no responses. I think it’s easy to forget how devastating that can fell when you’re sending applications all over the place and you pour in your heart and soul—no one likes writing cover letters, it is horrible! You just have to go through it. There are some people who get their job right out of college that sets them on that path and they’re very clear about what they want to do going forward. I’ve been all over the place, and I think just remembering how miserable those couple of months were and those few weeks where you don’t hear anything back that is important but it forces you to go forward and think about creative ways to make money or creative ways to exercise the things that you like to whether its writing, whether its talking, ect it forces you to be a little bit more creative in how you pursue them.

Pilram: It’s pretty similar to have you’ve already heard. I had a disastrous consulting firm interview situation not at all unlike yours, halfway through I was like, “What am I doing here?” and I had to draw something on the board, something to do with cars, but it was a different firm. Same thing, it was grueling, it was like eight different interviews and I was running out of things to say. I was asking them questions and that’s something that’s very important too. You should go in, knowing exactly what your core, key values are. I sit down every couple of years and think about this; am I an office person? Am I field person? Am I okay with unknowns and grueling travel schedules or do I need consistency and stability? I don’t create consistency and stability so halfway through the interview, they’re telling me, “Are you prepared to put in ten hours a day? We’ll feed you and we do all these fun things, but basically you’ll be sitting in this beautiful office for ten plus hours a day.” I was sitting there and thought, “What am I doing? I wouldn’t even want this job.” Of course at the end I got the “thank you so much for applying, it wasn’t a fit.”

That, along with the government system, applying for jobs is absolutely grueling. There’s a science to it and if you’re not a preselected, shoe-in candidate, then you’re going to work hours and days of work to get things to fit in perfectly for the job description. I know we’ll probably talk about this later, but networking and other ways to use your time to build your credibility and figure out what it is really that you want to do instead of waiting for someone to reject you. Be proactive and figure out what you want and be the one that fits that.

Floyd: I have two, one that’s very brief. You all might be experiencing a lot of academic success if you’re still in undergrad or graduate school and you often get research assistants with professors, and then there’s going to be that time when you really go out on a limb, and you have that crisis of confidence. And I’ll share my experience of that with you. When I was 20 I went over and worked for the Thai

judiciary in the north of Bangkok. And my logic at the time, and I’ll be very honest with you, was ‘I’ve lived in London, this’ll be easy – they speak some English!” and I did, to my credit, ask before I got on the plane, ‘do I need to know how to speak Thai?’ and the answer was not, and that was just a lie. So I ended up living in the suburbs of Bangkok working for some decently impressive people, where thankfully they did mainly need my English language skills. But I was so overwhelmed and I had my first true professional crisis of confidence, ‘can I do this? Am I going to make it?’ that I ended up sitting outside of Aunty Anne’s getting my lemonade and my pretzel and bawling my eyes out in downtown Bangkok. I had a real moment of revisiting. And that taught me to really evaluate anxiety and fear and say is this something that I’m legitimately interested in that’s worth it, or should I go home? And I did decide to stick it out, but that was the real painful lesson, I lost my confidence, how do I pick myself and move forward. And the lesson if you can do that and move forward. But on a professional level, where I’ll talk about failure a little later on, I ran the press corps for a strategic communications group and ran a number of international conferences, this particular story comes from one that was in Bahrain. When you organize a big conference and you’re part of a team, you want the newspaper articles to say your name, it’s kind of a big thing. And my boss, who I respected enormously, came marching in to the conference room at about 7am into the press room where I’m there writing press releases and liaising with journalists, and throws down the New York Times and shows me an article where they had written a very long article on the conference and not mentioned our name. and part of my job is to do strategic communications and PR and to try and get our name in the paper. So I went to the journalist who was one of the 370 or so in attendance and just said ‘can you correct the online version? Can you use our name? That’d be really great, we spent a lot of time and money to bring everyone together, we are the conveners, this conference wouldn’t happen without us. And the journalist, and he has every right to do so, said that it wouldn’t fit, they’d have to take out editorial content and they needed to focus on the substantial issues. And that taught me a number of really important lessons in failure. One is you’re not going to get everything you ask for and you need to respect journalistic integrity, and they were very polite, but sometimes the answer is going to be no. It taught me the importance of cultivating real relationships with people so that I can walk up and ask for a favour, and it’s not because I’m schmoozing or I’m calling in things where I don’t have the credibility to do so and it also taught me, again in the kind of fear column of going to the boss and saying so, I’m not going to be able to do this and the ability to manage up as well as down and to not get fired for something because you can turn to relationships that one had built. At the exact same conference I was able to walk up to the gentleman from the BBC and say please put our name back in and because I had a real relationship with that individual, in 30 seconds he had it corrected. This is something that kind of came out of the hierarchy. So, quality relationships with people you actually care about, that you’re not going to waste their time and being able to tell the boss no sometimes and respecting that you are not going to get your way.

Razavi: This is a perfect sideway to what I was going to next ask. Yes, exactly. What type of food to eat when you have failure? No, but one of the things I teach young people at the university and I interact with a lot of their fears and one of their concerns is, there are just so many qualified people. There are so many people. I have heard this a thousand times. There are so many people - who look exactly like me. Right. They studied Arabic, they did a semester abroad at AUC, they did an internship in Washington one summer, right. How am I going to get a full time job? How do I set myself apart? So I’m going to throw this out there. How do you really make a name for yourself in this extremely competitive

environment where there’s a lot of amazing, talented people? And how do you network in a way that doesn’t make you an ass whole? How do you network effectively? So, anyone can jump at that.

Floyd: Actually some of my students are in the room, so I can give a little bit of feedback on that front. One of my big pieces of advice in terms of how to set yourself apart from the 300 plus resumes that some fairly junior person has to go through in one night and then hand to their boss. This might seem incredibly simplistic but a mere coma out of place when you have that overworked, really tired person who isn’t getting any extra money is looking for any reason whatsoever, even if it’s a real job and not an internship, to put you in the no pile. Any reason, so you must be perfect. And I’m also willing to offer resume samples, and cover samples after this, if anyone wants to see, that’s fine. The second thing that I find sets people apart on their applications is to have something really kind of unique and quirky that is genuine. So I enrolled in Thai classes after learning I needed to speak it. And I got a lot of call backs in the immediate years after graduation because that was something weird and different, but legitimate. Not I did it quite because I thought I needed to take it. I have a lot of students coming to me and saying, “I’m going to learn Mandarin to help me get a job.” And I say to them, “Are you interested in taking that?”, because otherwise it’s really not going to materialise, in my opinion, the way that you think it will. And when it comes to networking, especially because there’s a reception or ten every single night in DC, and if you are in the job hunt and you’re beginning to be panicked, you’re probably going to walk up to anyone and start talking to them. Well, if you are interested in what they have to say or just interested in having a human connection, that’s alright, but it is so transparent, so awkward if you’re just there to get their business card. And some people, I don’t do this but some people do, pretend not to have one. Ah, I don’t have one, but I’ll take yours and I’ll definitely send you an email or call you. Sometimes they’re not lying to you but a lot of the times they are. To be genuinely interested in the person, and if the conversation isn’t working out, it’s fine to make a polite exit and just say, you know it was so nice to talk with you. I’m going to go grab a drink. They’re going to appreciate you not wasting their time. If there is a dream job or internship you have, I find there are two ways you can really put in the legwork. One is to start reaching out to that organisation or someone in particular that you admire. Maybe even a full year ahead of time. Set those cards up. Now this has to be a dream. I would never turn this down if I were offered it. And I have a young man right now who is interning over at the National Defence University and he came to me and said a full year before it was due, I want to do this. How do we do this? And we figure out a good kind of mentor or someone that he could super transparently just say I love what you do and I would just like to know who you are so that when his application was in many months later the gentleman knew who he was. He was already on top of the pile and that person reading all those applications knows if I offer it to him, he’s taking it. He’s going to work his ass off for me and really just kind of set it apart. And don’t be afraid to put in a whole lot of effort, genuine effort. The first dream internship I ever landed, and it was in college, over winter break, I made 60 different applications and lined them all up and Mum got to veto countries that I wasn’t supposed to go to and sent them off and kind of just followed them up one by one. Now that is overkill and I’ve alluded to how detail oriented I am now, but if you’re going to put in the leg work and you’re going to do the follow up, it’s going to be hard work. And out of those 60 I sent off, three called me, one offered me the internship. That is luck, not skill, but I got my number one choice, right, now we can all do math. That’s luck, but that has set the career trajectory for probably the next eight years. That was a bit long winded, I apologise, but I do teach this to my students.

Arkin: I would just say another thing. I’m sure you’re all really smart and know a lot of things about things, but a lot of times, and it’s really frustrating to have a conversation about unpaid internships. No task is too small and do it with a smile. It’s no fun to make the coffees and to go run the errands, but if you need to make yourself valuable, and a lot of times the staff that you’re working for and with are overburdened and they have a lot going on and you being there helping with the tasks with a smile and doing it graciously means so much because it really shows. And most of the time, and if you’re working for someone who’s respectful and understands what the value you bring is, they know and they’ll acknowledge that what you’re doing is way above your non-pay grade and even so, no task is too small, and you never know how that’s going to play out in a longer term. It’s just so important to do every task graciously. And just don’t be an asshole. You are in competition, to a certain extent, with everyone you’re around with, but don’t be a jerk because that person who you’re sitting next to for your internship today, could get a job at a place that you want to work tomorrow. And that person could be your next ticket. That person could introduce you to someone else who might hire you for another job. So be respectfully competitive, but acknowledge that you do have to be competitive but you don’t want to do it in a way that’s going to paint you in a bad light in the future.

Razavi: Do you guys want to add anything?

Pilram: Yeah. I made a list of my top ideas. First of all, I’m not lazy, I’m efficient. There is now way that I would have ever done 60 applications. I picked the ones I really, absolutely couldn’t live without. And I’m not detail oriented, so if my twin sister is, so if she’s watching, she is. She’s a film producer, I’m not, so I have to be really careful, and I rely really heavily on personal relationships, because that’s where my passion is. I love people. I love figuring out what makes people tick, where the systems are…

Alright, here’s my list. First of all, having a genuine curiosity for how things work and building relationships with people based on your passion. So I was a surfer, and then a sailor, so joining a yacht club. Out here in DC I was in the surf rider foundation and I volunteered on the weekends and met really cool people. So I’ve always met people outside of the cocktail parties because I was doing stuff I love doing. And everyone has hobbies, everyone on the Hill’s got a hobby doing something, probably sailing. So if those are things you like to do, you’ll meet people. You’ll meet people at the gym, you’ll meet people through your spin class, you’ll meet people at yoga, you’ll meet people surfing. So I’m always doing the things I love doing and come to find out there’s really interesting people doing it too. Another one. I don’t go to happy hours unless I’ve already identified people that I want to meet up with. So the people I want to meet up with, and I’m looking for them while I’m there, so I’m never standing there by myself or cold call introducing myself to people whose cards I want. I’m there because I’ve already emailed or linked in with people and said, “Hey, this event looks interesting. Do you want to meet there?” And then they’ll probably introduce you to other people that they know. So I tend not to fly into a happy hour without knowing at least a couple of people in friendly fire that I’m going to aim for. Find your tribe, so kind of like that passion. This is the anthropologist in me speaking out. I know the people I like spending my time with and the types of people. There’s all different types. So who are the people that actually you really want to have a conversation with, not just schmooze with. What are you

interested in? Who do you want to talk to? Help people through networking. Most of my networking is finding connections for other people. So they’re not even for me. I’ll be listening, and again I’m a systems thinker, I’ll hear someone say something about anything. Oh, I want to get into xy or z and I’ll think of four or five people in my brain rolodex that are doing that who I can say, hey so and so copied in the cc line, we met at this place, and they’re interested in that. And that person’s like thanks. And you become known as someone who can connect people. And being a connector is just as important as being connected. Offer something they need. Alright, so this is the last one I’ll share. Again, systems thinking, be something different than they already have. Look for something they might need. If it’s a quantitative place, where could you offer qualitative expertise or assistance? Or attempt a different perspective than what they already have. And be in a different place. You know, I did my rotation through DC and thought that I wanted to do anything I could to come back to DC, but I’m from California. And I got my start in defense at the naval post graduate school completely by accident. And I found out that by being out at MPS, anyone who wanted something of interest from DC would go via us because they wanted to go golfing out at Pebble Beach. Right, so I didn’t need to be in DC. In fact I climbed much quicker being outside of the bubble of DC, because I wasn’t completing with anyone. I was the only one who looked like me, who was doing what I was doing, who was gung-ho about it. So now I’m in Kansas City working at Fort Leavenworth but I’m out here teaching at the Pentagon. So I’m still in without having to be here and I’m enjoying being outside of that competition for now.

Razavi: If you don’t mind Ali, I’m going to skip over you as the supreme leader of the panel and open it up to questions and if you could jump in at any point and add. Yeah, so I will open it up to questions for you guys, or if you have comments on anything that’s been said here. Otherwise I have more questions for the panel.

AUDIENCE - I have a question because I think we talked about how to make it and how not to make it. How some people fake it and become successful in DC. How to avoid actually making it, not faking it.

Razavi: Ali, since I skipped over you last time.

Wyne: It’s difficult. And I guess it may seem like an evasive answer, but I’m going to answer your question by actually bringing in a few points from my answer to your earlier question. I think one very important point is, and I think all of you have alluded to this, is making your indispensable. And whether that is running errands or doing certain tasks that you feel might be beneath you, but doing them cheerfully, doing them well. And I’ve found actually that whether I’m in a current position or whether I’m looking to work for somebody, I’ve noticed actually a change in the response to my emails, depending on how I end the email. So it used to be shortly after, both directly and then shortly after graduating college, if I’d identified somebody for whom I wanted to work I would end an email by saying, is there was an opportunity to look for a job or an internship. And what I realised is that busy people, who are busy, high profile people get inundated with those types of messages saying please give me a job, please give me an internship. What I started doing though in response to a conversation I had with someone not that long ago, and he advised instead of saying or instead of asking directly, I would

like a job, ending it off by asking how can I contribute to your work? It’s a different kind of fit. And even if both you and the person you are emailing have a sense that this person probably is inclining in the direction of wanting to work for me in a formal capacity, it seems a little less opportunistic and it does actually force the person you are contacting to say well, maybe there are ways in which this person might be able to contribute to my research or my analysis. So one way I think, in terms of making yourself indispensable, is asking, “How can I contribute to your work?” The second, one of you made this point, which I think is so important is, making this point about preserving all your contacts, and this is not just a matter of not burning bridges, but this is a matter of preserving and sustaining relationships, even if you don’t think this person is going to be valuable to you, even if haven’t engaged with this person in 10 years. I found again and again that connections have been indispensable to me in helping me move from one position to the next, even when I would never have guessed it. One example that I would give, I think I mentioned when I was discussing my disastrous interview at AD Shaw early in my senior year. Now the prior summer through Booker Crook actually I had an internship in the Belfer Centre and it was a good experience but I thought essentially that was going to be the end of it. But I said to myself, well, the person I worked for that summer, he’s a prominent individual. He’s well respected in the foreign policy and national security community, so at a minimum I should at least stay in touch with him. And so, every couple of months I would send him an email. Not to say please give me a job, I didn’t even know if he had any job openings, but just to say this is what I’m up to, this is what I’m doing, just updates. So my first job out of college I was working at the Carnegie endowment for international peace, which is a think tank here in DC and as my year at Carnegie was winding down, I was applying for jobs, not having any luck. And so I sent this supervisor of mine from the Belfer Centre, I sent him an email, again not asking for a job, but just saying I wanted to let you know I’m winding down my time at the Carnegie, then he emailed me back and said, “What are you doing come the fall?” And I said, “I don’t know yet, because as of now nothing because nothing is panning out and he said, do you want to work for me full time? And I deliberated for about 30 seconds. And YES! But it just so happened that he had had an unexpected vacancy in his research team, and the position he had to later advertise a position officially on the website, but basically he said between you and me I have an unexpected opening in my research team, because you’ve interned for me before, at least I’m familiar with you and so we should talk about it. Now, if I hadn’t stayed in touch with him, I’m not sure if he would have responded and if he would have even presented the opportunity. I have found again and again that connections from several years ago have proven very important. I guess the last point I would make, and this goes back to a conversation I had with someone recently. In terms of how to, I think going to your earlier question about how to establish yourself under so many people who are so evidently qualified. My initial impulse when I was graduating from college and I was thinking how should I position myself, I wanted to be the jack of all trades. I wanted to be someone who could be seen as a kind of subject matter expert on a whole range of topics. I basically thought that the more topics on which I could at least feign expertise, the more versatile I’m going to be, the more useful I’m going to be and that turned out actually to be the totally wrong approach. The thing I’ve heard again and again is, when you’re beginning your career, it is impossible to be an expert on 10 topics. It’s just not possible. So rather what you should do is, pick one topic, ideally something that if you’ve had some field experience or some travel experience. But pick a topic, whether it’s a functional topic, a country, but pick one thing and establish your expertise on that topic and do that really persistently, whether that’s through writing blog posts, through writing articles, landing internships or jobs dealing with that area of expertise. You have to establish your area, you have to establish your expertise on a particular topic before people then say

ok well, this person is serious, clearly she’s done the work, now what does the person have to offer on other topics. So I would say, rather than trying to be the jack of all trades initially, pick one topic and expand.

Arkin: I actually totally disagree. May I disagree? There’s very little that’s more annoying in this space, when you see a 20 year old who’s like “Well, I wrote a research paper on that. I don’t know if you know, but I did an extensive research project on this.” And you’re trying to standing up, and you’re sitting on panels. So I agree that that is a way to make yourself stand out, you pick a region, you learn a language, you understand it well, you go and do it. But I think at this stage, when you’re just starting out, you should be open to a lot of opportunities and you shouldn’t write something off because you’ve decided that you’re going to be an expert on Thai law , and all of a sudden an opportunity comes about to work on women’s rights in Guatemala, right. You want to be open to opportunities, and you never know which door you might open that leads you down a path you never thought of, but might be really interesting, and might be a better fit for you, and you might like it more. So I would caution against actually, unless you’re 100% that sure you want to work on something for the rest of your life, and that is it, I think being open to different things is actually really important

Floyd: Can I give feedback on that? So I like what you said, if you’re willing to put several years into it maybe, really carve out that niche and establish yourself. Not a too long time period and we all know people in DC who have successfully done that route. Something that I find has set apart interns is exactly what you just mentioned. But to add to that, some sort of skill set which is helpful and which makes your boss’ day a little better. What I mean by that, when I see an intern application which says ‘oh, I do know how to write a memo’ or ‘I do know how to do a press release’ or a one page briefing, or I’ve actually had a little bit of work and I have a skill set in development, so I can pick up the phone and ask for money, or I know how to liaise with people who can give you money and not have them leave and take their chequebook with them. To say I have written a research paper that is lackful because I’m not the expert, but I can also give you this skillset to make your life ever so slightly easier. Students can say “I want to do an internship in Russian foreign policy for the Council for Foreign Relations and all I see is that they have communications internships’ and I yell at them ‘go for that one!’ because once you do a good job there the communications team will recommend you out to the subject matter experts. And to your point, if they can hire a former intern or someone that’s taken a lower level job, that immediately sets you apart. So even to graduating seniors I’ve said to apply for unpaid internships. Not ideal, but mum and dad know this isn’t a permanent solution, but then if you do a good job you’ll be at the top of the hiring list when that position comes open. Now it doesn’t always work that way if there are security clearances and the like involved, but certainly in the think tank world.

Razavi: Any more questions?

Pilram: Have fun. This is such a great time to just go for it. I mean back to the competition piece, when I applied for the State Department you could only pick two, and there were a few that were paid, and I only knew which office I wanted to apply to because someone told me. And it’s so important, what are you going to do? So, I have never made coffee or pushed papers, not once, and it’s not because I didn’t want to, it’s because I hunted out the offices that seemed less sexy and turned out to be so amazing that I would be doing stuff right alongside the presidential appointees. But it took some research and some networking for people to say ‘apply to this job’. Because I was in protocol and I wanted, as an

anthropologist, one of the country desks, but I went for protocol because someone told me ‘you’re going to go to every high level everything’. So, one job I had was delivering all the white House Christmas photos of President Bush to every ambassador in Washington. Do you know how many residencies there are in Washington? Over 200. And, so I had a private driver and it took me like 2 weeks to do this, but it was required that I shook hands with every ambassador to give the photo. So everybody is going to apply to protocol now. And that job required a top secret clearance. I’ve held that clearance for over 10 years now. That job was an incredible opportunity that wasn’t lost on me. Other than delivering photos, the first thing that I did was delivering a gift to Angela Merkel in the Oval Office. My job was to scan it and make sure it didn’t have any bombs in it, rewrap it, we had a mobile wrapping station, rewrap it impeccably and deliver it. So you know, there’s like all these hidden jobs in Washington too. And outside of Washington that liaise with Washington. So you can get like a kick-ass job doing really cool stuff and getting exposed to some of those things that you don’t even know exist.

Audience Question: I was wondering for a lot of the applications for internships at the Department of State, Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, they are all USA Jobs do you have any advice for those applications?

Pilram: So I’m going through a hopeful transition back into my GS position right now, I’ve been through it multiple times. USA Jobs is a computerised process, it goes through a system that reads resumes, so you have to have key words in there that match, and it is a game that you have to play to make it through USA Jobs if you’re cold applying, outside of the general application. So what can you do to better your chances? Apply where there are less people applying, the country desk officer jobs have thousands of people apply, protocol, it had some, but people didn’t know that it existed. So having to only pick two, I picked two offices that I wasn’t sure there’d be that many people applying, and then I called them, followed up with them, badgered them.

Atkins: Yeah, and also for the USA Jobs, two things to add to that. 1) If you can, and some people are adept at this and some people aren’t, so you need to figure out who’s actually responsible, it’s usually a deputy director, or someone with that kind of title who’s actually running the management of the particular office. Cold call works sometimes, and sometimes it doesn’t and people get really annoyed, but you shouldn’t rule that out as an opportunity to call someone and say I see this internship is being listed, what exactly are you looking for, what would be the key attributes and characteristics? The other thing I wanted to add is, once you’re in your internship or first job, seek out people who you do see where you want to be in five years, 10 years, 15 years, and ask them to get coffee with you. I had a stint in department and after two weeks one of the women came up to me and she was like ‘look we’re going to have a talk, this is not a good place for you, I want to help you find someplace better’. And it was because in those two weeks I had smiled and done all the things I needed to do, and it just wasn’t a good fit and there wasn’t a lot of opportunity. But find those people. And it doesn’t have to be, it’s so easy to want to reach the top and speak to the director, find the people who are just a few years ahead of you and then maybe 10 years and talk to them about how you can do better, how you can support them, what are your next moves, what are they?

Pilram: I’m having dinner with my mentors tomorrow, they’ve been mentoring me wince 2006, and they’re like my litmus test on everything, so that’s pretty cool

Razavi: And mentors don’t have to be a lot older than you, I was going to say, never think someone is not powerful enough, because sometimes the person who is right above you has a lot of power in that

office in terms of the day to day management. And they may be looking for their replacement later on. So do not be mean to the person who is directly above you whenever you are doing a job.

Atkins: And also, don’t be mean to secretaries, they really run offices.

Wyne: If I could just add, I think the point is, and I agree 150%. I remember, actually in many of my jobs, but in particular when I worked at the Kennedy School development centre, and you sort of have your formal orientation and then your more informal orientation where you have people who’ve been there a while and they sit you down for coffee or lunch, and that was what came up again and again. Because what I found out was, who is the first person who helps you get an appointment with the boss? It’s the scheduler. And I actually found out, maybe this is a common practice, but my boss when I was at the Center was not the first person to read his own email, it was his assistant. And I had this happen again and again where I would sent this assignment and I realised I had messed something up or there were typos, so I would call up his assistant and say ‘hey can you delete that email’, so he wouldn’t even know. But they’re really important, and I think, this can be anybody, this can be people who are your boss’ assistant, it can be secretaries, it can be schedulers, it can even be people who are involved in HR in different capacities. But word gets around about how you interact with people, particularly if you’re in a small office. If you have a pleasant personality, if you treat people with respect, no matter who they are, word gets around. Certain opportunities will open up to you, certain placements will open up to you, and your life will be a lot easier. So I just 150% agree on that.

Pilram: And if you want to talk after about USA Jobs, anyone, I’ve been through the process so many times.

Razavi: Time for one more question…

Audience: A two parter: The first one is, when you get that first job or job after school, how long is too long to stay at that job, at what part do you start looking for that next job? And I guess there are different timelines for different industries, but I guess I’m curious to hear what people have to say about when you start thinking about that next step? Second, and this is not just for the panel, maybe anyone can answer, but there are so many online job board listings, what are ones that are really worth the time? You’ve only got so many hours in the day to be looking, which ones should we be looking at?

Razavi: In the interests of time I’m going to get two of you to answer that question. So what sites, where shoud we be looking?

Floyd: In my 20-somethings one of the quickest ways was I build a network of people that then led to job openings, so that’s a little roundabout answer to you. I volunteered with a group called Young Professionals in Foreign Policy and to this day I can pick up the phone to my friend at the White House, to my friend at the CIA, to my friend over at Brookings, we have a mafia. Now I’m aged out of the group I think, but that gave me my 20-something network that I can go to if there’s going to be a job, and they have a job-link board. So I recommend that organisation very highly, but I volunteered not just joined, because then you get to know everyone and you do favours for each other.

Pilram: I can actually answer your two questions super quick. First, all the time, the minute I get a job I start looking. Why? Because if I find the perfect job description, I want to add those things to the job I have, or leverage what I want in it. So I never stop looking. My poor family and friends, I’m constantly looking. Resources, like you said, join clubs and fellowships, we’re part of the 99 under 33, which is an

award sort of fellowship thing. I’m a Truman fellow – Truman National Security Project fellow. I was an LB Emerging Leader in Biosecurity Fellow, so I’ve got the biosecurity stuff. Those are pre-vetted. So you go through the whole application to be a fellow and you have like a year in the fellowship, you’re also highly vetted so that if any jobs come up, you’re the first person you ask each other for, before cold job applications. Find your tribe.

Razavi: Sarah, do you want to answer about how long you should stay at your first job?

Atkins: Ah, until you burn out of it. I think especially in your first job, if you’re not learning, if you’re not gaining knowledge, if you’re not meeting new people, if you’re not building new skills, you should be looking. I personally ran into a problem, not a problem, but jumped around a lot, and I feel like that, I don’t think it hampered me but it got to a point where I was like ‘ok you’ve got to settle down for a little bit here’. But especially in DC for your first couple of jobs, one year two years, that’s fine. It used to be, maybe 15-20 years ago, you wanted to show consistency and you wanted to show that you’re committed. I think in DC people expect you to move and people expect you to move on. But you don’t want to move for the sake of moving. Unless you’re really miserable, in which case you should, but you want to think strategically, and you don’t want to get to that stage in your job where you’re unhappy. Also look inward in the organisation, see if there are other things that you should be adding to your portfolio, see if there are other ways that you can bolster what you are doing to thicken up your resume or to make yourself happier every day. But also accept the fact, and this goes back to I’m sure you are all unique individual snowflakes, there are a lot of people looking for the same jobs, so you need to be prepared to not have your dream job, in the beginning especially.

Pilram: or find them outside of DC

Floyd: One of the, I tried to keep it light at the beginning, but one of the reasons that I did pursue the PhD program and I did make a big career shift is I realised I was ceasing to grow vertically in my job. And it was a good company and I liked the people, my horizontal skills, my responsibilities, even my salary was increasing, but there was not opportunity for upward advancement, and you’ll run into companies like that and when a different opportunity arises, a challenge, I like to take challenges that come my way (sometimes for worse and then you end up crying), you can step out of the company, and DC, and then lateral in at potentially a higher level. And that goes to being nice to your colleagues and other people because you might well be back there.

Razavi: So be nice to everybody, no matter how low you think they are, put yourself out there, leave DC for a period of time, and, did I miss anything?

Atkins: No, but I was just going to say, and especially for women, the ‘be nice’, don’t get stepped on though. Stick up for yourself. It is fine to be asked to make coffee and get copies, and you want to do everything with a smile, but you also need to ask for more responsibilities, and you need to expect respect for what you are doing. So be nice, but be firm.

Razavi: Great, I think that’s a perfect place to stop. Thank you all for coming.

Transcript by Yaseen Lotfi, Gabrielle Redelinghuys and Claire Connellan