In Their Own Words
An International Career Panel with Reves Hall Alumni
{{youtube:small:left|j67wR8sabTg}} The Reves Center and alumni who lived in Reves Hall in the ‘90s joined forces to host an international career panel.
The alumni traveled from Texas, Chicago, Indiana, California and D.C, for Homecoming weekend in order to impart some of the wisdom they have gained since graduation. The transcript has been edited slightly for clarity and length.
Panelists
Ken Beare '93, Captain, Texas Army National GuardKen Beare is a captain in the Texas Army National Guard in a part-time (“M-Day” or “Traditional”) status. He grew up in Wilmington, Delaware, and graduated from William & Mary in 1993 with an interdisciplinary degree in political philosophy. He pursued graduate study in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, dropping out after three years. He enlisted in the United States Army in 1996 as a combat engineer. He was stationed in Louisiana and Germany, with peacekeeping deployments to Bosnia and Kosovo. |
Claire Ehmann '94, Senior Executive, Deputy Director for Management Services, USAIDClaire Ehmann oversees the Agency’s operational readiness, workforce safety during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a wide range of management services. She also manages the Agency’s real estate portfolio and planning efforts for the post-pandemic Future of Work. She has served as an Agency career representative for two Presidential transitions, ensuring smooth continuity of USAID operations across changes of Administration. From 2015-16, she was selected as a White House Leadership Development Fellow and spent a year at the Office of Management and Budget, working on federal IT, open data, and data-driven decision making for the Federal Chief Information Officer. |
Chai-Shian Kua ’94, Urban Tree Science Leader, The Morton ArboretumClaire Ehmann oversees the Agency’s operational readiness, workforce safety during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a wide range of management services. She also manages the Agency’s real estate portfolio and planning efforts for the post-pandemic Future of Work. She has served as an Agency career representative for two Presidential transitions, ensuring smooth continuity of USAID operations across changes of Administration. From 2015-16, she was selected as a White House Leadership Development Fellow and spent a year at the Office of Management and Budget, working on federal IT, open data, and data-driven decision making for the Federal Chief Information Officer. |
Ducie Le '94, Assistant Director, Federal Reserve BankAt the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, DC, Ducie Le oversees twenty attorneys, economists, analysts, and managers enforcing financial consumer protection laws and conducting mergers & acquisitions analysis. |
Jonathan Noble '94, Senior Assistant Provost for Internationalization, Notre Dame UniversityNoble leads Notre Dame International’s global research, international partnerships and advancement, and serves as the University’s regional leader for Asia and Europe. Noble is a teaching professor for Notre Dame International, an advisor for the Keough School of Global Affairs, an associate of the University’s global advancement team, and a faculty fellow of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, the Liu Institute for Asia & Asian Studies, and the Initiative for Global Development.
|
After leaving active duty in 2003, he returned to Delaware and joined the Pennsylvania Army National Guard. He deployed to Iraq in 2004-2005 and to Afghanistan in 2008. After commissioning as an engineer officer in 2011, he deployed to Kuwait in 2012-2013. He moved to Austin in 2014 and transferred to the Texas Army National Guard. From 2017-2020 he commanded a combat engineer company; his command time included service on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2017-2018. Most recently he deployed again to Kuwait in 2020-2021 as a staff officer with the 36th Infantry Division. His interests include running, history, French, travel, and long walks to and from Whole Foods. He is currently working on his first novel. 
Before returning to the Federal Reserve in 2013, Le served as Associate General Counsel for Capital One in its headquarters in McLean, Virginia. At Capital One, she led the company’s Regulatory Policy Team. Prior to joining Capital One in 2006, Le was an attorney at the Federal Reserve Board for seven years where her responsibilities included drafting regulations and guidance. Le began her legal career as an attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice and spent her law school summers interning at the Bangkok office of Baker & McKenzie and working with asylum seekers in the Hong Kong refugee camps. 
As assistant provost for Asia between 2012 and 2017, Noble was the founding director of the Beijing Global Gateway and founder of the Greater China Scholars Program. Focusing his research and teaching on contemporary Chinese culture and society, Noble is the author of over 50 articles, essays, and translations, and was one of 20 China scholars in the United States selected in 2005 to participate in the inaugural Public Intellectuals Program sponsored by the National Committee on United States-China Relations. DUCIE LE (Moderator): It’s a pleasure and honor for all of us to be back here. When Chai-Shian was living at Reves she was an international student from Malaysia majoring in biology with a minor in music. Next to her is Jon [Noble]. Jon, you were an in-state Virginia student majoring in East Asian Studies. Claire, you and I were roommates; you were from New York and majoring in English. Ken, you were from Delaware, majoring in political philosophy. So, as you can see, there are a lot of different backgrounds represented here—in STEM, in academia, in government and in military here. We’re excited to talk about the spirit of Reves and our different career paths in the international arena.
Vanessa Estella ‘94 was from Guam studying government. She is monitoring the Zoom chat.
I think the first question I have for all of you is what do you do for a living and what did you do after leaving William & Mary to get to this point in your career.
CHAI-SHIAN KUA: I am currently the Urban Tree Science Leader at the Morton Arboretum of Chicago, and if you were to tell me that I would be working with trees when I was student here, I would say, “No way!” I knew nothing about trees. I came here to study human genetics and biology, and then I went on to grad school in the U.K. to do my master’s degree in human genetics and then I went back to Malaysia to start a PhD in cancer research on the island of Borneo.
But somehow when I was in Borneo there were many things that happened including a forest fire and a financial crisis in the ‘90s, and I came back to the U.S., and the reason I came back is mainly I met a botanist there and then I started studying trees, because DNA is DNA. It’s just four letters, whether it’s human or trees; the technology is transferable. So I started working on plants and trees and then we moved to China and worked in a botanical garden. Part of the reason was because I want our kids to learn Chinese so we moved to Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden near the border of Laos in southwest China working for the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and I was on the faculty while doing my Ph.D. There is that kind of flexibility in the Chinese education system. After that we came back to the U.S. and lived in Texas for a little bit. Then we moved to Chicago.
JON NOBLE: If I may add a few things to Chai-Shian’s accomplishments. She is an incredible pianist, and while we were students here I think we created a duet—I played the clarinet—a duet focused on DNA. Somehow we integrated DNA into the composition of the piece.
I was studying Mandarin Chinese as a student at William & Mary and I think I passed because of Chai-Shian. She kept me motivated to study every day. When I graduated in 1994 I went immediately into graduate school and received my Ph.D. in East Asian languages and literatures nine years later in 2003.
I had conducted research in Beijing for four years during that time. Chai-Shian and I randomly ran into each other in what was called at the time Xinjiang Village and of course Xinjiang is in the news quite a bit these days. After finishing my Ph.D. I was hired by the University of Notre Dame to teach about China, and my research was primarily focused on underground Chinese cinema—cinema or film that was made illegally in China—and also experimental theater. After teaching for a few years the university’s provost invited me to lead the university’s Asia initiatives and that led to expanding the University of Notre Dame’s engagement and educational programs related to Asia several years later. The office—similar to Reves—called Notre Dame International, was established. I became assistant provost for Asia. I’m now senior assistant provost for internationalization. The University of Notre Dame has a network of centers around the world, and currently I manage those centers located in London, Rome Mumbai Beijing and Hong Kong. In the early earlier days of working at Notre Dame I helped set up the university’s first institute focused on Asia and Asian studies. It’s called the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies. I developed international scholarship programs and set up the university centers in Mumbai Beijing and Hong Kong.
I really owe all of this to Reves. I was greatly inspired by the time I was a student here. My intellectual, personal and professional trajectory are so very much aligned with the experience that I had here as a student, so thank you, Reves.
CLAIRE EHMANN: I think a lot of us feel the same way about our career trajectory, that we really do tie it back here to the Reves Center.
I work for the U.S. Agency for International Development, that’s the U.S. government’s arm for foreign aid. We do humanitarian assistance but also in international development in many sectors including health and education and then also democracy human rights and governance where I worked.
I was definitely influenced by the two years that I lived in Reves, and I knew I wanted to do something international after undergrad, so I had a Fulbright Scholarship to study African cinema. My connection was in Burkina Faso in Ouagadougou. There is a pan-African film festival every two years there. It’s a really great experience being able to study and also learn about living in a different culture and speak French.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to go into cinema, but I had met people working in international development, so I worked for a non-profit organization that worked on nonviolent conflict. And then I realized if you want to work in the international development space most people do have a master’s degree, so I did go back and got my master’s in public affairs from Princeton University. After Princeton I was looking for jobs and I found something called the Presidential Management Fellows program. This is a program that you can only apply for coming out of your master’s degree, but it’s a really great way to get into the federal government.
I thought well, we’ll try this maybe a couple years, and now it’s 21 years later and I’m still in the government.
Working in the public sector is just very interesting. An organization like USAID is about 11,000 people worldwide, 5,000 domestic, so it’s big enough that you can really move around in your career. At USAID I’ve worked on different regions—Europe, Eurasia, Asia, the Middle East. I’ve worked in different sectors. I worked on democracy and human rights and governance, and now I’m the deputy director for management services, so I’m working on all of our workforce safety plans and really thinking about how all of our staff—we’ve been teleworking since March of 2020—thinking about how we can have a safe re-entry back, and also just thinking about the future of work. I think a lot of us don’t necessarily want to go back to the same five days a week commuting, and so it’s a really interesting time thinking about what should our buildings be for, what should our telework be for, what is the new future? Working in the government there are so many different things you could possibly work on.
KEN BEARE: I have to start by saying I’m not here speaking officially on behalf of the Department of Defense or the Texas Military Department, and I’m not here to recruit anybody. I do want to encourage a greater awareness of the role that the reserve component plays in our military.
When I was living in Reves I did not dream about joining the military, but three years into grad school in philosophy I dropped out. There’s no nicer way of putting that. And for the lack of any obvious alternatives, I enlisted in the United States Army as a combat engineer. There are not very many William & Mary graduates who have enlisted as combat engineers in the army; it’s not one of the brainier jobs to do. However, in my basic training unit of 150 soldiers near the end of basic training one guy came up to me asked me where I went to school, and I said William & Mary. He said, ‘Oh no way. What year?’ I said ’93. ‘No way!’ So he also was a ‘93 William & Mary graduate. We’d actually met a couple times. It turns out we happened to be in the same basic training unit. After six years I went into the Guard, and it’s been a sort of career for me, and it’s been an international career. I’ve been able to go to parts of the world that I most likely never would have gone otherwise.
I’m what’s called an M-Day or Traditional Guardsman. That means that I have to do a minimum of one weekend a month and two weeks every year of training. Many if not most people in the reserve component usually do a lot more time than that, and that includes active duty deployments. What typically you’ll see nowadays, and for the last 20 years, is that most reservists do maybe one active duty deployment, which is a bit under a year of total active duty time about every five years.
Over a third of our uniformed service members across all the branches are in the reserve component. On the Army side there are actually more soldiers in the Army Reserve in the National Guard than there are in the active duty force. In every conflict we’ve been in, the reserves have been a major part of it. The exception was the Vietnam War. In the Vietnam War very few national guard units were sent to Vietnam. People joined the national guard so that they would not be subject to the draft. But since then certainly since 9/11 the reserves have played a big role. When I was in Iraq in 2005 nearly half of all U.S. forces in Iraq and the Persian Gulf theater were reserve components.
So it’s something I think that a lot of people are not aware of, and I think a lot of people don’t consider the possibility of that as a career. So for me it’s had its frustrations. There are a lot of things that make you want to scream when you’re in the military, but it’s also been a very enriching, worthwhile experience for me.
LE: So for the sake of all the students, I wanted to get your thoughts on advice and recommendations you would have for students interested in your area of expertise going into your area of work.
NOBLE: In the area of the internationalization of higher education I think we can look at the past and see the enormous growth of the number of international students studying in the United States, from a few thousand students in the 1950s to over a million today, and that trajectory is likely to continue. In terms of students who are studying abroad, if you look at the numbers from the ‘50s--50,000 or so students studying abroad--that has changed to over 300,000 today and increasing. I think one can see although there are certain immediate threats to global mobility, I would argue we need to continue to help promote mobility betwee countries for education.
The opportunities for being involved in the international dimension of higher education are enormous, so I would say, to Claire’s point, think about the future of work; think about the future of higher education. There are several sources for information. There are professional organizations such as NAFSA for international educators. There are resources on their website. It’s easier now to connect to these organizations than ever before because there are so many online virtual events hosted not only from the United States but also from Europe and Asia and all over the world.
Another organization, IIE (Institute for International Education) puts out a very important annual Open Doors report. There are many resources on their website. I would say if you’re interested in looking at the future of higher education read the Chronicle of Higher Education. I’m sure through the library at William & Mary you could get that online.
But the important thing here is to think about the future of higher education.
The other point I want to emphasize is mentorship is so important. Don’t be shy in terms of developing a network of mentors for yourself , which can be helpful for career discernment. When you’re facing questions or challenges about your direction mentors can be extraordinarily helpful. This is of course applicable for students, but is also applicable early in and throughout your career.
LE: What is the special ingredient that you took away from your William & Mary education and at Reves that you cannot get anywhere else?
KUA: I came from Malaysia where there was more of a British-style education. I was thinking about going to college in the U.K. and I was accepted to quite a few colleges over there, but I chose to come to William & Mary because of the liberal arts education. I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to become. I wanted to have some flexibility and to try out different things and enjoy different things. I was telling Ducie at lunch just now that one of the best classes that I took at William & Mary was the harpsichord and pipe organ class. One time I was at the pipe organ at the Presbyterian Church on Richmond Road waiting for my professor. My professor was also the court musician for the Governor’s Palace, so he showed up in his outfit with tights, poet shirt, jacket and hat and a walking stick. It’s just so amazing; it’s as if you’re being transported back into the colonial time. That was an experience that probably you can’t find anywhere else.
EHMANN: It’s not very original but I definitely would say the [William & Mary difference] is the people that I met--definitely the friends that I made at William & Mary. And then also the experience of living in Reves because it was residential. We would hang out in the kitchen. You’re always together and it’s really the way you get to know people and make good friends.
We’re all still in contact. During the pandemic we would have these weekly zooms together. Ducie has instituted a Reves Zoom and I really want to give Ducie a lot of credit because she really has brought all of us together. I think the experience of kind of being able to live together was one of the most special things.
LE: I would add just along those lines it’s the community—the professors who are teaching us day-to-day— but also the open door policy. Along with what Jon was saying, they are willing to talk to you and brainstorm with you and talk about your future, talk about your past, talk about what your intellectual curiosities are.
The friends here—like Claire said—not only are they lifelong friends but they are intellectually curious. They push you to think harder, but they’re also kind. There’s just a kindness, a generosity of time and intellect, that I think is in this community at William & Mary. When I go out in the world it’s something that I come back to because it’s comforting. It’s definitely very comforting.
NOBLE: My experience studying in Beijing as a junior was absolutely transformational and phenomenal. In fact I was admitted to transfer to Juilliard because I was also a musician and when I was in China I was having such a phenomenal experience I said, “No, I am staying with William & Mary.” And I returned and I lived in Reves.
And it’s the combination of the community, the care for the intellectual development of each student, and I think there’s a sense of service. All of us here are serving in the government or through higher education or NGOs in different ways, so there’s a sense of serving the community for—hopefully—a better future.
LE: How did you choose your career? Was it coincidence, accident or intentional?
KUA: I thought I was going to be this cancer geneticist who was going to find the cure for cancer or something like that, but it didn’t happen that way. As I said, my husband is a botanist and we just started working together and I’m now working on trees. It has evolved from basic research doing phylogenetics, basic inquiries about evolution to what I’m doing right now, which is working with arborists evaluating the 2020 Chicago region tree census. The census is a comprehensive assessment of the value and benefits provided by trees in the Chicago region so that we understand what the region the forest is made of —the species composition and also the benefits that it provides— so we can have that information for better management of the regional forest, because trees can do many wonderful things that we’re not aware of. So I guess it just evolved organically. So intention at first—it was like I’m going to go this path—but life does not work that way. At least that’s for me.
EHMANN: I think about this a lot. It’s always good to have a goal or something that you think you might like to do. I definitely thought I wanted to do something international, and I definitely also was interested in some kind of service. But as Chai-shian said, you really don’t ever know what it’s going to be. In any job, even if it’s not a very good job, you can always find something in it that you’re learning or something new. So definitely I think you can try to think through a path but it probably won’t work out that way, so it’s good to take each opportunity and ask, “What what am I learning from this experience?”
BEARE: Well, as I said I had no real plan. I was 25 years old and not having good options at that point, so I joined in the late ‘90s. When I was in the regular army I served in Bosnia and Kosovo which was a very meaningful experience because we were doing peacekeeping. It was very clear what we were doing. By having stopped the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo that there were many tens of thousands of people that were remaining alive because of it.
I was in the regular army when 9/11 happened. I got out a year or two later but then went into the guard. And for me it was always just the sense that I needed to know that I still belonged to all that. And it’s really very much an idea that you know other people are going to do this, that other units are going, other soldiers are going to be deploying to these places, and that you’re choosing to go alongside them. That really was what it worked out to for me.
NOBLE: It’s really a great question and so I have many strands of thoughts running through my mind. One way to look at it is after four years of learning Chinese at William & Mary and then taking a trip to the Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., I realized I still couldn’t read everything, all the calligraphy. It was just a feeling of being entirely inadequate, so I think it was being motivated by a passion for intellectual curiosity. I thought I would probably get a Ph.D. in something and now I barely received it because I had switched when I was living in Beijing I was working for a real estate firm and market entry firm for three or four years and so I had to leave that management finance real estate job to then come back to the United States defend my dissertation which I did successfully and then I had left my job in Beijing and I could have returned to it I said well wait a second I have been learning and studying my entire life and the the U.S. government paid for most of my Ph.D. and I figured I needed to really serve higher education at that time. And it is such a joy and a privilege really to have the opportunity to work with college students.
LE: I think the question I have for you on behalf of all William & Mary students is, where you work, what jobs do you have for current students for new graduates other categories of William & Mary alums? Are you hiring and what do you have and where can they go to find these jobs?
EHMANN: I’m really encouraging people to think about public service if you’re a student. The government is so big, there are so many different things you can do. People always ask me doesn’t the bureaucracy weigh you down? Bureaucracy is everywhere in every organization. Sometimes that bureaucracy is like a rule that actually we want to protect. Federal jobs are all posted on something called USAJobs. There is one program for students coming out of either high school or undergraduate called the Pathways Program, that is a way into the government at the lower grades. Then there is the Presidential Management Fellow program that I talked about, which is a competitive program when you’re coming out of your master’s degree program. It’s really a great opportunity.
If you’re thinking about careers in international development, a lot of the jobs at USAID do require a master’s degree. I always tell people try to get experience overseas any way you can. There are lots of internship programs overseas. You can do the Peace Corps; that’s really excellent experience. You can work for some of the NGOs that actually work on foreign assistance; that’s also a great place to work to get that experience.
BEARE: I didn’t do ROTC. My life would have taken a very different path if I had. William & Mary has a reserve officer training corps program that feeds both into active duty with the army and reserve duty with the army. It is possible to participate in ROTC without taking on a service obligation. Up to a certain point you can participate in ROTC without contracting or without receiving any sort of scholarship. That’s not identical to what military service is like, but it does give some degree of familiarity and introduction to service. You have to be a United States citizen to become commissioned as an officer in the military. You can be a naturalized citizen to do that. It is possible for non-citizens in some cases to enlist in the military if they already have residency status.
Aside from actually serving in the military, I would encourage anybody that’s looking at an international career to learn more about the military and about the military reserves. The reason I say that is because the military plays a really huge role in our national international engagement, and that’s not just in terms of actual combat. When you use the word ‘engagement’ in a military context, there’s a whole spectrum of activities that includes: humanitarian operations; interactions with foreign governments at multiple levels; military-to-military communications; and joint training opportunities. And I think Claire would probably attest from her time with USAID that there are a lot of international functions where the military in some ways is involved or is alongside.
We don’t do really well in our media culture of communicating what the military is actually like. There are a lot of stereotypes about what people are like in the military, and that’s why I basically can’t watch anything out of Hollywood about the military because they get everything wrong. The people in the United States military are an incredibly diverse group of people, across all ethnicities, across the whole political spectrum. So the only way to get past those stereotypes is to become more aware and actually talk to people, get to know people that are in the military, both in the active and the reserve component. Because at the end of the day all of us as citizens in the country have an investment in what our military does in our name.
KUA: If you want to start a STEM job go talk to the professor. Knock on the door. Write an email. Try to get a research assistantship or internship in a lab. In the botanical world we are always looking for volunteers. If you enjoy working outside doing some gardening or restoration or anything. A lot of botanical gardens welcome volunteers to help with their work because funding is actually pretty limited in some of these NGOs. In terms of academic research at a higher levelthere are the REU programs for research experience for undergraduate programs, which is founded by the National Science Foundation, and I think it’s limited to American students only. These research opportunities are competitive but the students do get a pretty decent stipend for about 10 weeks of work. In my organization we also have programs for high school students to tag along and follow a researcher. We also have a fellowship for scientists who are interested in tree science, and senior scientists and so on and so forth. Internationally the National Science Foundation has collaborative programs with China, and those are grant-based projects. Sometimes they have funding for graduate fellows to participate in the international exchange programs.
NOBLE: I would just echo what has just been said and emphasize how important it is to be proactive in terms of understanding the resources that are available at your particular institution. So if it’s William & Mary, there are many wonderful resources available to support independent research or research projects and in this day and age there are many ways in which you can connect virtually to researchers around the world—labs around the world—NGOs around the world. So enter into conversations with your professors—your mentors—about what may be possible in terms of leveraging possibilities for international research experience and international career exploration.
LE: And now to make a plug for the Federal Reserve in Washington, D.C., for those who of you who are interested. There are three programs I wanted to mention. One is summer internships and they are paid. The recruiting process is going on right now so if you’re interested in working in Washington, D.C. with the Federal Reserve the central bank of the United States that’s an option.
The second program we have is for research assistants so if you’re about to graduate and you have an econ major mathematics statistics background the Federal Reserve actually hires U.S. college grads for two years. You’re a research assistant working with a Federal Reserve, an economist doing analysis and work with them. The idea is that it’s two years because then after that you would go off to grad school.
And then the third program of course is just ongoing hiring as needs come up. We do hire and some of them are appropriate for new graduates. I do hope you consider the Federal Reserve.
So the last thing I would [ask the panel] is, in two words or less, What does Reves—or your experience living here at Reves—mean to you?
NOBLE: Expanding the world.
LE: That’s three words! All right. Claire you’ve got to beat that.
EHMANN: Colorful community.
BEARE: Air conditioning.
