by osc.r
Hello again! It has been quite a long time since I’ve written in the journal, I’ll admit. 2021 proved to be a year of many, many disruptions that I had never experienced before. Taking a gap year from school during the pandemic and three surgeries on my AC joint left me more in a state of emotional and physical limbo than I’ve ever been in. Now that I’ve healed up well and wrapped up the first semester of my remaining four in college, I thankfully have a lot of cool things to discuss in terms of where my head is in regards to the things I want to accomplish in diplomacy and foreign policy.
Things are looking to be exciting, and I’m thrilled to share it with you!
Before we dive into it, I would like to quickly note that I want to make this topic an annual recurrence as a sort of review of my thinking at that specific point in time on anything career/mission-related. I’ll be referring to my career more as my mission than anything, solely to avoid the glumness of an overly professional/work-related atmosphere. I don’t want to view or address my work as “work” for the drudgery of it, but rather as my mission wrought of an intense desire to engage meaningfully on things and issues of significant importance to me. I find these topics fascinating and want for there to be an aura of excitement and passion in these writings, not one of stiff & stale analytical drudgery. This is not an assignment, but my genuine attempt to craft and articulate my life’s mission. 🤠
We get it!! Let’s move on already and get to the good stuff!
Where am I with foreign policy? Where am I heading?
In August 2021, I finally returned to school after taking a gap year that I decided to take for numerous reasons. After the world entered its first summer in quarantine, I had just completed my first semester at Cornell and found myself stumbling over more questions that I had hoped for. The most prominent one being, what does it mean to work in diplomacy/US foreign policy? What exactly is diplomacy, and where do I fit into that? I knew that human rights were extremely important to me and that international security was interesting, but this wasn’t enough. Anxious and filled with countless unanswered questions, I knew I wasn’t ready to go back to school to start my third year of college, arguably the most pivotal for several reasons. I left Spring 2020 with the world of foreign policy opened wide to me by colleagues in my government society and professors I met at school, and while exciting, I felt I knew too little about the field to fully take advantage of my junior year to set myself up well for post-undergrad life. Up to this point, the entire purpose of an undergraduate is to lay the foundation for the type of person I want to become, both in work and life. In Summer 2020 I dreaded, perhaps a bit too much, that I would not be doing myself justice if I were to just blindly go into that year. The thought of doing only online classes was also just depressing, which admittedly made the decision to take a gap easier.
So I did. I took a risk with both my financial future and with my time to pause my undergraduate studies in order to pursue a better understanding of what it means to work in foreign policy, and what that meant to me. For my fellow Latinx and Hispanic friends reading this, you probably know what that sounded like to my mother. “AY! MI HIJO NO VA TERMINAR SUS ESTUDIOS!” SE ACABÓ LA VIDA DE MI HIJO!”
Maybe I messed around with her sometimes and said,
“COŃO!!! THAT’S RIGHT!! I’m finally dropping out to start my own company and make an app… it’s gonna be like youtube but with a twist… on the blockchain.”
She didn’t need to understand what the blockchain was to smack my ass right back to class, clean on the first shot, and surprisingly through all enrollment holds.
During my gap year, I began to chip away at this question by working with relevant internships and side-projects in search for direction. One of the side projects I began tackling was an expansion project of my pre-professional government society to other universities. While working with some students at Brown to build up a chapter there, I met someone who put me onto some of Samantha Power’s work, her memoir The Education of an Idealist, and her famous book, A Problem from Hell.
I never expected these books to be as pivotal to my journey as they are proving to be. (I’ll elaborate more about the lessons I’ve drawn from memoirs in another blog post.) I learned so much about the history of human rights law, and how the world has slowly, but surely, developed legal mechanisms in which we can utilize to combat human rights violations, crimes against humanity and genocide. It taught me a lot not just about the technical components of foreign policy, but how powerful law is to understanding and implementing policies against genocide and atrocities. Her work made me extremely appreciative of international law, and pushed me to recognize how law is an exciting avenue of which aspiring human rights advocates can pursue.
I think that the most important thing it taught me is to ask yourself the right questions regarding the type of impact you want to have in your work/mission. There are almost infinite ways to engage on the things that matter to you, and with access to only a finite amount of time, what is the limit of one’s capacity to contribute? What are the things I can do to push forward the work of countless human rights advocates and thinkers of the 20th century? How can I draw from the best of my abilities to meaningfully engage on these issues – perhaps not on a scale that is grand nor profound to the world, but meaningful to me?
I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to somewhat answer any of these questions. Pairing this uncertainty with the nearly infinite ways that one can protect, defend, and promote human rights via numerous dimensions (federal government, private sector, NGO, international organizations, etc…), you best believe I’ve had my fair share of screaming into the void moments. But now, I think the closest thing to an answer I’ve got to this uncertainty is to simply follow my gut and see where that takes me. I know I’ve always wanted to do extensive research through a doctorate program, and that hasn’t gone away, but now I can’t avoid a desire to go to law school and really dig into the legal end of these topics.
So, I think the direction my gut is taking me is towards the pursuit of a JD/PhD to explore one broad question that I believe both captures my primary interests in human rights, and lays the foundation to work meaningfully as a practitioner from; In what ways can we evolve international policies, laws, or institutions to be more effective in responding to genocide & human rights violations?
Looking ahead to the remaining three semesters I have left of college, I’ve set a couple of goals to begin to tackle this question. First, to either get into law school or a PhD program before I graduate, but more importantly, to begin to tackle this question in the opportunities I’ll have as an undergraduate. This coming summer, I’ll be an intern at the Executive office of the US Mission to the UN, which will be a fascinating time to explore this question from the foreign policy/professional end of things. For senior year, I want to focus the bulk of my energy on understanding this question in an honors thesis with the Government department here at Cornell. It’s actually kind of funny to view this as the unholy trinity of my time left at Cornell; law school applications for junior deferral programs, USUN, and the honors thesis.
Let’s do this.
Oscar's Journal 