Catherine, Foreign Service Specialist
It's a sense of adventure, and the sense of obligation and pride for the country that accepted my parents.
My name is Catherine, I'm a Foreign Service specialist, currently stationed in Washington, D.C. as a program analyst.
I'm originally from Miami, Florida. I am a child of Cuban refugees. I found out about the Foreign Service sitting one day in my graduate level class the professor started talking about this job and I thought wow, that sounds kind of interesting.
I always thought I would join the Foreign Service, do it for a couple of years, and then move on. And after a couple of years, it was infectious. I didn't want to leave.
I'm a CPA, I have a masters in accounting, and I had friends who joined the big accounting firms, and they were doing regular boring stuff. And I look at what I've done.
I've lived all around the world, I've traveled extensively. At the end of the day I have a richer experience of life than my colleagues who stayed behind in Miami. I come from a very close knit family, so the idea of leaving home was hard. Once they saw the black passport, the diplomatic passport, the sense of pride was just—out of this world.