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By Kate Helm
Growing up near an Army base, Marcia Bernicat ’75 always knew she wanted to travel. The history graduate found her niche in the Foreign Service, representing the U.S. at home and abroad since 1981.
Currently based in Washington, D.C., Bernicat is office director for India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and Bhutan.
“The country desks are the basic organization liaison between [U.S.] embassies in the field and the State Department, as well as those countries’ embassies here in Washington,” she explains. “We act as ‘traffic cops’ to make sure that issues are being dealt with. Our base responsibility is for anything that affects that bilateral relationship.”
At Lafayette, Bernicat looked for ways to combine her academic interests with her desire to travel. She didn’t learn of the Foreign Service, however, until she attended graduate school at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, where she earned her M.S. degree in 1980. An internship in Liberia in 1979 sold her on a career in the field.
“I was hooked,” she recalls. “I was assigned to the Economics Section at the Embassy in Monrovia. Skylab [America’s first experimental space station, launched by NASA in 1973] fell that summer – literally fell from the sky – and Liberia was in the path of its trajectory. So, they sent the intern in to tell the government it might fall on them. I came home and said, ‘Sign me up.’ It was really hands-on from the beginning.”
Bernicat’s previous overseas tours include Bridgetown, Barbados; Bamako, Mali; Marseilles, France; New Delhi, India; Casablanca, Morocco; and Lilongwe, Malawi. Fluent in French, she has studied Hindi and Russian. In Washington, she previously served as special assistant to former Deputy Secretary of State John C. Whitehead in the Operations Center, and on the Nepal/India Desk. She will begin a new assignment in the summer of 2008.
Although it can be a challenge to change jobs, homes, schools for her children, and sometimes even the language she’s using for work every three years, Bernicat says the opportunity to interact with people from around the world far outweighs the demands.
“Diplomacy depends on people-to-people contact, regardless of the policy or country you’re working with,” she says. “It’s the ability to understand the culture and political imperatives of the country as well as the personal attributes of your counterpart in order to tell [the host country] what the U.S. is trying to do and to influence U.S. policy to take into account the needs of the host country. I was involved with small-term development that brought water to Mali, discussed human rights in India using the U.S. civil rights movement as a model, and comforted employees dying of AIDS in Malawi.”
Though at the time she didn’t know she would enter the Foreign Service, Bernicat believes her undergraduate years gave her valuable exposure to different cultures and helped her develop essential leadership skills. She used most of her electives on contemporary history courses, which gave her a solid grounding in international relations and political science, was a member of international student organizations, and took on leadership positions with Association of Black Collegians.
Last February, Bernicat delivered the keynote address, “In the Middle of It: Leadership in Service,” at the annual Lafayette Leadership Institute and led a workshop where she was able to interact with alumnae and students.
“Until last spring, I hadn’t been back on campus in over 20 years – mostly because my work kept me out of the country,” she says. “I saw the Leadership Council develop and said, ‘I really want to participate.’ I’m so glad I did. I do feel it’s important. I was reconnecting and I really enjoyed meeting some of the other women alums.
“I did some recruiting for the Foreign Service, and there was a lot of interest. I was amazed, quite frankly, with the r�sum�s. The things [students] do for work in the summer – getting serious jobs and internships – were very impressive. It’s heartening to see there are people really interested in the Foreign Service. I urge people to look into the internships that are offered, either in Washington or overseas, because it’s such an unusual career that affects every aspect of your life.”