He Said: The First Day

Today was my first official day as a Foreign Service Officer... how exciting! After the travel fiasco and the stress worrying about having missed my first day, I was much more at ease today and ready to head off for my first day. After getting a good nights sleep (finally) I got up early to get ready to head to the main State Department building in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of DC. Of course, today was the first time in 6 months that I cut myself shaving! It took me 15 minutes to get the bleeding to stop, and I was so desperate that I actually salted the wound to make it stop so I could head out the door. Man, did that burn!

After getting to "Main State" I headed through security and was directed to the auditorium where the second day of HR orientation would take place. Right away, the coordinators whisked me away to be joined in a side room with three other of my classmates who also missed yesterday's orientation. Once we were all there, we took the oath and afterward were officially Foreign Service Officers! After the oath we were treated to a briefing on how to handle confidential material which was followed by a conversation on what considerations needed to be taken for us with our health insurance because of all the overseas travel. In the afternoon we had the chance to finalize all our employment paperwork, talk to the health insurance providers, and in the end were awarded our security badges as official State Department employees.

Today was an absolutely amazing day. I met some truly great people and am so exciting about the upcoming seven weeks. I truly enjoyed hearing about everyone's backgrounds and how they ended up as FSOs. Tomorrow starts our official training at the Foreign Service Institute, so I am really looking forward to getting into the real "work" of this process and learning about how to do my new job.

It's strange to be back in DC, but definitely exciting at the same time. I'm so looking forward to seeing Steph tomorrow so I can share this experience with her firsthand. There's so much going on, I know that she will have a blast and that this will then become OUR experience.

Well now its time to relax as tomorrow will be another early day!