CONWAY, Ark. (April 18, 2017) – Sarah Logan ’18 will spend 10 weeks this summer at the American Embassy in Katmandu, Nepal, as an intern with the U.S. State Department’s Consular Services.
The program offers 900 intern positions, ranging from spots in the Budget Office to the United Nations. Applicants choose two potential locations based on their interests.
Logan, an international relations major from Greenwood, Arkansas, selected Nepal and an embassy in Africa. The latter ultimately chose not to take interns, and Logan was matched with Nepal.
“I have gotten European exposure, but I haven’t really been anywhere else,” she said.
Logan spent last spring in the Hendrix-in-Brussels study program and interned with the Carnegie International Endowment for Peace, a U.S. think tank.
In summer 2015, she was part of a student Odyssey trip to Southeast Europe led by Hendrix politics and international relations professor Dr. Kiril Kolev and interned with the Faulkner County District Courthouse in Conway.
Smaller embassies like Nepal reply more heavily on interns and offer a range of opportunities for students, said Logan, whose duties will range from editing documents and shadowing career Foreign Service officers to assisting in sending cables to Washington, D.C., migration tracking, and
addressing issues with U.S. citizens living abroad.
Logan hopes to join the Foreign Service one day. The Foreign Service test, application and interview process usually takes up to two years. In the meantime, Logan may attend graduate school in international affairs.
Before choosing international relations, Logan was “on a pre-law path” until she took a human rights issues course with politics and international relations professor Dr. Daniel Whelan. The course inspired her to be an international relations major. She was one of the students who assisted
Dr. Whelan in updates for the fifth edition of his international human rights book. Logan has also been a Model U.N. participant and has received awards for outstanding representative.
“International Relations was the best avenue and the most effective intersection of all my interests,” she said. “And I love traveling.”
Logan plans on doing lots of traveling over the summer, including some Himalayan trekking, though likely not Mount Everest. She also wants to visit Hindu and Buddhist monuments with strong cultural significance.
“This will be Hendrix’s second consecutive summer to have a student accepted to the State Department’s extremely competitive internship program,” said Leigh Lassiter-Counts ’01 of the Office of Career Services. “Professional experience on an international
scale is a huge benefit for our students as the world of work becomes increasingly more global and interconnected. Each year, we see the number of Hendrix students looking for and acquiring international internships grow as they look to gain cultural competency and appreciation.”
In the past three years alone, Hendrix students have interned in 14 foreign countries:
- Australia
- Belgium
- Brazil
- China
- Finland
- France
- Ghana
- Ireland
- Myanmar
- The Netherlands
- Panama
- Peru
- Rwanda
- Vietnam
About
Hendrix College
Hendrix College is a private liberal arts college in Conway, Arkansas. Founded in 1876 and affiliated with the United Methodist Church since 1884, Hendrix is featured in Colleges
That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think about Colleges and is nationally recognized in numerous college guides, lists, and rankings for academic quality, community, innovation, and value. For more information, visit
www.hendrix.edu.