Hello Sagehens! If you’re reading this and are a current or recent grad student, congrats; you survived your freshmen/sophomore/junior/senior year! If you’re an alum, thank you for hosting me in San Francisco during spring break for Pomona’s Alternabreak, single-handedly making college affordable for me, and reading yet another summer intern’s blog.
Sophomore year is finally over and I can now enjoy life again without worrying about when my econ problem set is due or if I really need to watch a three-hour movie for my Intro to Media Studies class. The semester has been over for a month now, and summer is (almost) in full swing (five days for those of you counting). If you read my blogs last summer, you know that I’m into politics; if you didn’t, then let me introduce myself.
I’m Leyth, and I’m a rising junior majoring in International Relations and minoring in Middle Eastern Studies. I hail from Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, but I am a SoCal guy at heart (Claremont’s sunsets are to die for). I was interning in DC last summer, and I somehow have convinced myself to tough out the weather yet again this summer to be in the District, or “This Town.”
This summer, I’m working at — drumroll please — the State Department, aka my future employer. I’m in the Secretary’s Office for Global Partnerships, which “aims to strengthen and deepen U.S. diplomacy and development around the world through partnerships that leverage the creativity, innovation, and core business resources of partners for greater impact,” so basically bridging the gap between the public and private sectors. There, I’m responsible for researching potential private partners that State would like to work with as well as vetting companies that wish to donate money to the State Department.
So far, I have been enjoying everything I’ve been doing and staring shamelessly at my official State badge every now and then. Every day, I wake up looking forward to walking through the big and confusing halls at State, while still managing to get to work seven minutes late, and helping to strengthen America’s diplomacy. While I have yet to casually bump into John Kerry in the halls, I have already made it my goal to do so before mid-August. Stay tuned for updates.