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Going to Nepal on a new assignment thrills Lauren Frese ’03.

She will be in the capital, Kathmandu, to serve in the political/economics section of the U.S. Embassy for four months.

“I’m really excited about going,” she says. “While I don’t know what my exact portfolio will be, it will involve meeting with different government officials and nongovernmental organizations and reporting back to Washington on various political and economic issues.”

As a member of the Presidential Management Fellowship Program for the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, Frese has worked in Washington, D.C. and New York City. She also has traveled to Central Asia to learn about programs that U.S. assistance funds in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. The bureau also addresses functional issues in Nepal, as well as India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the Maldives, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.

Frese, an international affairs graduate, won Lafayette’s George Wharton Pepper Prize, awarded annually by a vote of the student body and faculty to the senior “who most nearly represents the Lafayette ideal.” She then received her master’s degree at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, after which she was accepted into the two-year Presidential Management Fellowship Program.

“In my current position, I manage the foreign assistance budget for South and Central Asia and prepare our budget requests,” Frese says. “It involves coordination between the different desk officers and functional bureaus within the State Department, and our counterparts in the U.S. Agency for International Development and Department of Defense. With the recent appointment of Ambassador [Randall] Tobias as the director of foreign assistance, the budget process has changed a lot this year, so I have been trying to keep up and am learning a lot.”

The past three years have been busy for Frese. As she reflects on her time at Lafayette, she realizes the immense value of her experience.

“I loved Lafayette, and appreciate it more and more,” she says. “Living in a city now, I realize how lucky I was to have a close environment where I could still meet new people all the time, but see friendly faces everywhere. I had different activities available to me, and a good variety of classes where I met a lot of really interesting people and professors. At the same time, I could count on meeting up with all my close buddies every night by just going to the bar around the corner.”

She says the friendships she made at Lafayette “will last forever.”

Categorized in: Alumni Profiles