How IE Impacted My Graduate Experience and Career Interests
Alice Chu, Anthropology
Taking
the IE "Academic and Professional Consulting"
course during my last year in graduate school
came at a critical moment for me. I was
reaching the transitive point of wrapping
up my doctoral program and contemplating
my career options: to teach or not to teach?
This 'false dichotomy' of my future career
path became readily apparent within the
first few weeks of the IE course. By the
end of the semester, I had relearned the
notion of "teaching," and moreover,
had become an avid advocate of teaching
as not merely as a profession, but also
a practice.
In an example of the timeliness and application of the IE to my life, I found myself being interviewed for the U.S. State Department Foreign Service that same semester. At the time, I had no idea how well my IE training had prepared me for the all-day interview. From panel interviews to simulated group projects, from analytical scenarios to networking, I had discussed, participated, and honed just these skills in the multi-disciplinary and "thinking outside the box" environment of my IE class.
However, one critical moment stands out for me during the interview process. During the panel interview, I was asked to give an example of how my background would prepare me for a career in the Foreign Service. As a Ph.D. student in linguistic anthropology, and whose dissertation topic focuses on examining how political TV talk shows in Taiwan reflect the country's nascent democratization, I suddenly realized how viable my academic training was for the "real" world. My "esoteric" research of language use in the mass mediated space of talk shows easily translated to the diplomatic world of inter-cultural (mis)communication, face-to-face negotiation, and quasi-mediated performance.
In concrete terms, how did my one-course IE experience impact my life? In short, I am now a candidate for a position in the Foreign Service, a career opportunity I would never have considered, nor even be in the position of holding, a year ago. Moreover, should I be formally accepted and assigned a diplomatic posting, I will be able to realize my newfound goal of pursuing teaching as both a practice and a profession; in short, being a citizen-scholar.