President Barack Obama

Bauman ’93. Photo by Janos Nadudvari.

At the moment, Kirsten Bauman ’93 – who has played host to President Barack Obama and other members of Congress and conducted formal meetings to further the Korea–U.S. Free Trade Agreement – is negotiating a U.S.–Korea treaty on nuclear energy cooperation and working on a variety of other environmental, technological and health-related issues in the region.

Bauman and her husband work for the U.S. Foreign Service where they have been serving in Seoul since 2011, and, before that, in Addis Ababa; Athens; Washington, D.C.; and Paris – moving every two to four years. When their tenure in Korea is up in 2015, they expect to be relocated to the United States, where their family can finally experience the place that they have always been told is home.

Originally from Rockville, Md., Bauman started at the College in 1989. During her four years, she remembers being encouraged to enjoy the city, and also to look beyond it.

“I think I got a very good, well-rounded start in higher education at CofC,” she says. “My political science professors taught me that true learning is not only about getting good grades on tests.”

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It was in the halls of the political science department, in fact, that she saw a poster advertising the U.S. Department of State’s free annual foreign service exam.

“I have always been a restless person and I wanted to see the world,” she says. “I took the written exam and passed, but failed the oral segment in Washington, D.C.”

A few years later, after getting her master’s degree at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, she successfully retook the exam and began her career with the service in 2000 doing consulate work in Paris.

“I was lucky to start my career in such a beautiful place and also meet my husband, but I have to dispel the myth that diplomats lead a glamorous life sipping wine,” she says. “My daily job is to facilitate the communication between U.S. and foreign governments in order to build and foster relationships to advance American foreign policy objectives.”

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After next serving as a World Bank liaison in Washington, Bauman was transferred to Athens, where she served as a political officer responsible for informing U.S. policymakers on issues related to Turkey-Cyprus-Greece relations. But it was her next post in Ethiopia that was the most difficult. There, she worked as an environmental officer for geothermal development and water resource management across 14 East African countries. And there, she and her family faced the daily challenges, both logistical and emotional, of living in a comfortable American-style compound in a developing nation.

Read more of this article, which originally appeared in College of Charleston Magazine.