State Department Internship

  • Marie Schwieterman learned about the State Department's summer internship program through Rice University's Career Services Center. Applications are due during the fall semester, so it is best to start early. Internships can be paid or unpaid and are available in the spring, summer or fall. Applicants must have completed 60 or more semester hours by the beginning of the internship, and they must be U.S. citizens with good academic standing. Applicants must also pass a background investigation and receive either Secret or Top Secret clearance to be accepted.
  • Internships are available in Washington, D.C., as well as abroad. When available, housing is provided. Those applying for an international internship must list in order of preference the embassies or consulates at which they would like to be placed.
  • For more information or to download an application, please visit the Department of State Student Programs website.

Foreign Service:
The Road to Diplomacy

By Marie Schwieterman

As my train crossed into Austria at Hohenau, a uniformed conductor came down the aisle to stamp passports and check tickets. When he arrived at my seat, he greeted me with the friendly, colloquial “Grüß Gott” that you only hear in Austria and southern Germany. I thanked him and basked in the familiarity of the Austrian accent, which contrasts so sharply with the coarser Czech of the conductors who had accompanied our train since we entered the Czech Republic from Germany. I was on my way to Vienna to begin my summer internship in the Office of Economic and Political Affairs at the U.S. Embassy. My train was appropriately named “Franz Josef,” after the Emperor of the former Hapsburg dynasty.

It was the summer before my senior year at Rice University, and although the familiar view of lush, neat gardens and quaint towns with high steeples assured me that I was in Austria, a country in which, having studied abroad there, I felt at home, I was still nervous and unsure of what to expect. I would be working with Foreign Service officers—professionals who knew so much more than I did about politics, history and diplomacy. I would be in an unfamiliar environment of protocol, security measures and people who answered to the titles of “Ambassador,” “Deputy Chief of Missions” and “First Secretary so-and-so.” At the same time, I was extremely excited to have such a great opportunity to see diplomacy at work, to learn about working for the State Department, and, of course, to explore Vienna—the legendary city of music, art, history and world famous specialties like Wienerschnitzel, Sachertorte and Mélange coffee.

My first day was filled with introductions, securing my ID badges and attending a briefing held by embassy security officials. The briefing was conducted in a special room with fans to make background noise and padded walls to keep our conversation from being overheard or recorded. I learned about some of the security measures that were to become part of my internship: leaving cell phones in special boxes outside our offices, locking removable computer hard drives into a safe, and removing our embassy ID tags the moment we stepped outside the embassy gates so as not to draw unnecessary attention to ourselves as American citizens abroad.

Some of these security measures were very foreign to me, as one experience taught me. One morning, my supervisor asked me to take some documents to an Austrian government office in the inner city. As she gave me the address, she handed me her card to pay for a taxi. I told her I would just take the streetcar, as it ran almost directly between the embassy and my destination and would take the same amount of time. She shook her head, gently reminding me that I would be carrying official U.S. government documents and would have to travel by taxi to ensure their safe arrival. I could take public transportation on my way back, after I had delivered the documents. It was that morning, as I stepped into the taxi at the embassy guard post, that I first realized the inherent risks and the importance of security that accompany working in the U.S. Foreign Service. Throughout my 10-week internship, I met many embassy employees who were nicer and more personable than I had expected. My supervisor made appointments for all embassy interns to visit almost every section represented at the Viennese embassy. We met with officers in Agriculture, Customs and Immigration, Legal Affairs, Human Resources and Finance. These meetings were an unexpected extra that gave us insight into functions that we did not know existed in an embassy. We also got to hear many employees’ stories about how they began their careers with the U.S. government and about their work and life at other posts before working in Vienna.

Of course, I also had projects and assignments to complete, consisting of large quantities of reading, writing and research. One of my daily responsibilities was to read the cable traffic from Washington, D.C. and other embassies, as well as newspapers such as The International Herald Tribune and Der Standard, one of Austria’s leading newspapers. My work included writing the introductory remarks that the ambassador gave at a security conference, researching and briefing the ambassador on the upcoming elections in Germany and studying technology exchange laws in response to a cable from Washington. I attended numerous lectures and meetings about current issues, such as the hurdles facing Russia in its quest to join the E.U. and sustainable development in first-world countries.

Since Vienna is a host city for the offices of the U.N. and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), my fellow interns and I were invited to attend one day of the U.N.’s seemingly never-ending Conference on Corruption, as well as a weekly meeting of the OSCE. These meetings were conducted in many different languages; through our headphones, we could choose between English, German, Spanish, French and other translations to listen to diplomats from around the world discuss the issues at hand.

By the end of the summer, I had not only learned a great deal about foreign policy careers but also about cross-cultural understanding—an important asset in today’s increasingly diverse workplaces and cities. I could have read about Vienna’s history, art and music in books and studied German in my literature classes at Rice, but experiencing the city, meeting the locals, learning their dialect and gaining an appreciation for a different culture and people were experiences that could not take place in any classroom.

My belief in the importance of intercultural experiences led me to apply to the Japan Exchange in Teaching (JET) program during my senior year at Rice. I have been living in a small town in rural, northwestern Japan for a year now. As the other interns I met in Vienna take the Foreign Service exam or pursue a master’s degree in international policy, I will continue to gain cross-cultural understanding by teaching English in Japan with my sights on a career in international education. In this capacity, I hope to help high school and college students find their own opportunities to study abroad and learn about another culture.

Marie Schwieterman was a senior Mathematical Economic Analysis major at Rice University when she wrote this article. She speaks German, Japanese, and Spanish. She studied abroad in Vienna, Austria; Potsdam and Aachen, Germany; Mexico City, Mexico. She then worked as a teacher with the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program (JET).