BAHARA: CIVIL SERVICE PROFESSIONAL My name is Bahara,
and I'm a Civil Servant
in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs
and I work on international educational exchange programs.
My family moved to the United States when I was four years old.
I am multilingual and I use my language skills
a little bit on the job... my Persian language skills
a little bit as I work on student advising for Iranian students.
So, I manage a program that gives scholarships
to American undergraduate students to study abroad.
It sends about 3,000 Americans overseas to study and learn languages
and really increase their competitiveness in the
job market once they graduate.
The skills that I have developed over time in managing
these programs include crisis management,
prioritization, sort of, communicating with all of the
relevant parties involved. Everyone, from the students themselves,
to their U.S. institutions, to posts and embassies overseas,
maybe international colleges and universities as well.
The students' families, often times, are curious about what's happening
in a crisis situation obviously, so, I handle a lot of...
sort of connecting the dots, making sure everyone
is in the loop and ensuring that the students ultimately
have a successful experience abroad or in the U.S.
The First Lady came to speak to a group of students,
including some of my Gilman Scholars, who sat on stage
and participated in a Q&A and they got to go back stage
and take pictures with her and talk to her individually.
So, this particular group had all studied in China
and, one of them was fluent in Mandarin,
and so, he sort of opened up this presentation in
Howard University's auditorium with a greeting in Chinese.
And, you could tell that he was really proud of himself
and he should have been, I was incredibly proud of
all of them that day
and I got to shake the First Lady's hand and thank her for being there and it was...
I will never forget that day.
Because almost every element of my job relates to something overseas,
it...inevitably...I have to travel overseas and I'm lucky to have been able
to get to every continent.
I've been to East Asia, Japan, Korea, the Middle East, Brazil.
That I had to go and get to understand
the higher education systems of other countries, meet people overseas
that are my counterparts, understand really what impact
my work has on the ground in other countries.
In my travels overseas, everyone that I've met has said,
"Oh, no, you're not American, you don't look American."
And, it kind of caught me off guard the first time that it happened
because I never thought of myself as anything else.
But in every country that I went to it kept happening.
And, you know, it sort of led to a deeper conversation about,
"Well, what does it mean to be an American?"
And I had the opportunity to talk about my experiences as an American,
as somebody that wasn't born here but grew up here,
learned to speak different languages at the same time as I grew up
and, I think I was able to maybe broaden perspectives of the people that I met
who had a very narrow view of what it is to be an American.