How to Become a Foreign Service Officer: Part III--the QEP personal narratives

You have now taken the FSOT, and then you have spent the next two or so weeks trying desperately to remember some of the questions that you think you did wrong and google them obsessively for answers. Then you spend a week checking messages on the FSOT yahoo boards where everyone speculates wildly when the results will come out. You begin fearing that they will come out at a point when you have absolutely no access to Internet--the State Department is so advanced nowadays that it has a website where you can log in to get your Congrats/Regrets letter. And so you find yourself sitting at Heathrow Airport, on your way back from a skiing trip, with a screaming Son who is running around the airport windows gesticulating at planes in utter delight while all you can think of is that most likely the results are out and you have no way of getting them. And then, in a stroke of genius, you pull out your cellphone and turn it on (thank God, you have a GSM) and yes, there it is--a message from a caring Diplomat who has nobly gotten into my email account in New York, seen my results and left me a voicemail in case I check it at my stop-over in London. Thank you! You proceed to scream, "YES, YES, YES, I DID IT, I AM SO F..ING AWESOME" while the elderly British couple next to you at the airport look at you disapprovingly in a VERY reserved manner.

The next step is the writing of several personal narratives for review by the Qualifications Evaluation Panel (QEP). You have about a month to submit your essays, which generally address you intellectual, interpersonal, communication, managerial and leadership skills. No, I cannot publish the questions, come on now! There is a character limit of 1300 characters per essay, which includes spaces. It is shockingly little, about 200 words or so. And it takes forever to polish and fit within the limit. My suggestion would be to start writing right away. The idea is to take examples from your life that demonstrate such skills. The examples do not have to be you leading the UN in spontaneous liberating action somewhere in Africa, or being Dalai Lama's right hand, or writing the next shocking physics theory or speaking 36 languages, including Martian and negotiating peace with the little people of the Moon. The idea of the essays is to show that you have enough common sense, stamina and emotional maturity to live abroad, communicate with people different from you, show some initiative and creativity when things go hairy (and I mean situations like when you have to deal with the notorious Washington bureaucracy, not like riots in Egypt, which I would gladly take over the bureaucratic process) and retain your sense of humor while doing all of that.

Be creative. Don't try to guess what the reader wants to hear. If the question explores your intellectual skills, do not necessarily dwell upon your heroic efforts to solve Fermat's Last Theorem before you were beaten to it by Andrew Wiles. Write instead about some problem you had and the awesome creative, last minute solution you found to it. Interpersonal skills will deal with your ability to communicate with people different from you. Again, don't rack your brain for examples from your ground-breaking water project in the villages of the Zanzibar, where you learned to speak Kiunguja in a matter of weeks and danced with colored sticks around the ceremonial fire every night (unless you actually have, in which case more power to you!). Talk about your crazy Argentinian roommate, who danced tango while sleepwalking and covered his walls with soccer posters, your Wisconsin colleague and his cheese-eating habits at work, or your prim British inlaws.
Whatever you choose to write about, keep it simple and VERY much to the point. You will have so little capacity to write that every unnecessary, albeit colorful detail, will have to go.

Do not underestimate the QEP essays--they are a very important part of your application. Start writing right away. Keep thinking of better and better examples. Ask you grandma. Ask your boyfriend/spouse/best friend for such examples. People sometimes know us better than we know ourselves. And then ask someone to read your creations. After you have read them over 345 times, your judgement about their literary and stylistic quality might have suffered just a bit. Take the criticism in stride. Re-write. You are awesome! Submit. Do not panic. Wait.

In other news, I have officially accepted my offer to join the March 28 A-100 class. I will be a proud part of Class 160!!! I also received my salary offer, which was surprisingly good and made me instantly go online and search for small but meaningful gifts to buy for myself. Finally, for those of you taking a BEX language test and finding yourself later on desiring to change the language to another one for whatever reason, I learned the following very important tidbit--you can swap languages for bonus points (if the languages carry the same or more points, obviously) until you actually join FSI. So now I am fervently studying Bangla and count on your joint well wishes and some mad luck to pass on March 3. In a demonstration how fervently I am studying, I am taking tomorrow as a mental day off. I promise to think to myself in Bangla all morning. Or not.