By Roland McKay
Birmingham, Michigan
Political Science and History
After Mac: Fulbright Scholar
When I visited Macalester as a prospective student, I sat in on a class called “International Security,” in which students were encouraged to write papers in small groups rather than labor in isolation. The following spring, as a first-year student at Mac, I enrolled in the same class, pitching my views to my classmates and trying to achieve a consensus, much like a policy debate. I have always considered a political scientist who doesn’t participate in the policy process akin to a doctor who doesn’t practice medicine. Public service, especially in the area of national security, presents unique opportunities for liberal arts graduates.
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| Demonstration in Mexico City |
The summer after my junior year, I was an intern in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, dealing with real international security issues on an interagency task force and pitching to a deputy assistant secretary of defense my views on how to negotiate the international legal instruments necessary to implement the President’s new “Global Posture Initiative” on repositioning U.S. forces around the world.
I was one of a handful of undergraduate interns at the Pentagon and the only one from a liberal arts college. While I didn’t have the other interns’ training in intelligence studies, military science or nonproliferation, I did bring analytic skills from my Macalester education: a cogent writing style, foreign languages and a broad knowledge of history.
'A Mac course on the history of Latin America helped shed light on the presidential politics in Argentina when I was assigned as an intern to the American Embassy in Buenos Aires.'
—Roland McKay |
Numerous classes at Mac have bridged the gap between theory and practice in unexpected ways. As a summer intern in the American Embassy in Managua, I was able to apply civil-military relations theory from a political science seminar to the very real issue of convincing the Nicaraguan army to give up Soviet missiles left over from the civil war. A Mac course on the history of Latin America helped shed light on presidential politics in Argentina when I was later assigned as an intern to the American Embassy in Buenos Aires.
In turn, my government experience has enriched my time at Macalester. Drafting reporting cables to Washington and delivering diplomatic démarches to Foreign Ministry officials has served to tighten my writing style and enhance my oral presentation skills. While in Washington I was able to conduct interviews with senior officials from various agencies that formed the basis of my history honors thesis on U.S.-North Korean relations.
Macalester’s location in the Twin Cities also opened some doors for me. With the help of Professor David Blaney, I undertook an independent project on international law, examining the consequences of U.S. non-compliance with an international consular treaty. My paper was published in an undergraduate political science journal and led to a part-time consultancy with the Mexican government through a Minneapolis-based law firm. Memos I wrote while at Macalester eventually found their way into case materials before the International Court of Justice (Mexico v. United States) and the U.S. Supreme Court (Medellin v. Texas).
As a recipient of a Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowship from the State Department, I will complete a graduate program in international affairs and enter the Foreign Service as a political officer after a series of internships in Washington and in embassies abroad.
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