Meaning of Life After SAIS
[May 2011 Issue]
By Professor Thitinan Pongsudhirak
Perspectives from an Alumnus Teaching at SAIS
The time warp of May at SAIS is an annual ritual characterized by exams, internships for some, and orals, jobs, and commencement for others. And then there is packing for a time or for good. This compressed period induces stress and pressure of the immediate as well as anxiety and anticipation for what lies ahead. It is a crunch time not just for students but also for the utility of a SAIS education. What is SAIS good for after a year or two of trekking up and down Massachusetts Avenue into a few buildings?
Many SAIS grads and summer interns might enter the real world with a smug satisfaction of having been trained at a top-notch professional school only to discover certain shortcomings in their graduate education. SAIS provides some of the basic tools but much of the rest will come from learning by doing. From SAIS we become a jack of many trades, a substantive generalist of international studies. But our true expertise will be too narrow in niches and shallow in breadth. It will need harnessing and sharpening in the post-SAIS years. We can speak intelligently about current events in IR but would need to deepen expertise in regional area studies and functional economic analyses. SAIS teaches how to solve problems but the challenge frequently will be to come up with answers when problems have yet to arise. Without doubt, the paramount takeaway from the SAIS curriculum is the economics background. Without the economics requirements, the SAIS education would be devalued by half. (Thus it is alarming for future SAISers that the economics component of the oral exams has been done away with for 70 percent of graduating students.) With economics on one hand and a foreign language competency on the other, reinforced by functional fields and regional area studies, the SAIS product becomes formidable and competitively positioned. It is hard to beat an IR generalist who can make some sense of the world economy, equipped with regional familiarity and a foreign language. This is the recipe of SAIS’ success.
But beyond the curriculum, the friends we make at SAIS will stand us in good stead for subsequent years. The SAIS alumni network, up and down the class cohorts, is an underestimated but powerful asset. Job leads, internship setups and peer support, not to mention a readily available social life practically wherever we end up, are all benefits of the SAIS network. The friends we make at SAIS also tend to be lifelong friends. As months elapse into years, SAIS grads not only will maintain their bonds but their families often will make connections and remain connected. SAIS has much to offer to fulfill professional aspirations but it (like formal education elsewhere) cannot teach us how to cultivate a successful private life, which is decisive in our gross happiness. This is perhaps the trickiest and the most daunting challenge whose outcome rests beyond the forces under our control. SAIS students are international by definition. They are holders of a passport, which cannot be said for most Americans. Parochially inclined partners thus may not be compatible. Partners of SAISers should have some patience and appetite for the SAIS network. Otherwise our life outside and inside the home would not be as complete. For most grads, the first post-SAIS job is unlikely to be the last. We are not all set up to be winners but few of us will be losers. The trick is to land a job that embarks us on a flexible odyssey between now and retirement, and to build on a job to entrench and elevate or move on vertically. There is no set path. We will be tempted to maximize our careers from the SAIS degree but in the end it may be about optimizing. SAIS, through its formal training and off-campus benefits of networking and skills accumulation, enables us to make the most of our careers in the face of constraints and limitations.]
Graduating SAISers should think big but know that they are small. SAIS means a lot but probably less than we might think initially. The sense of humility and modesty, coupled with pride and confidence, forms a fertile basis for our career quest. Ultimately, how we end up is unlikely to be entirely our doing. Fate beckons but the onus is still and always on us.
Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a SAIS graduate from 1992, is a visiting professor in the Southeast Asia Studies Program for the Spring 2011 semester. Professor Pongsudhirak is also an Associate Professor and Director at the Institute of Security and International Studies (ISIS) at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand.
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