Having traveled to London before, Marty Rubenstein’s decision to return there to study abroad her junior year was an easy choice. Delving into her comparative studies classes on economics and law at the London School of Economics, Marty found her viewpoints challenged and worldview expanded. Returning to the U.S. with a new sense of independence and self-confidence, Marty embarked on a career in the federal government and earned a Master’s degree. After ten years in the White House in the Office of Management and Budget, Marty joined the National Science Foundation (NSF), a U.S. government agency that funds fundamental basic research in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Serving as CFO since 2010, Marty oversees the NSF’s budget of $7.5 billion (FY16), resulting in 11,000 awards supporting 350,000 U.S. research scientists and students annually. In our interview, Marty shares how study abroad has helped her succeed professionally and why one of the best souvenirs from London was coming home with a new name.

IES Abroad: As a student at American University, what motivated you to study in London?

Marty Rubenstein: I had been to London a couple of times, I was a huge Anglophile, and I loved to travel, so it was a simple decision for me. I had a lot of support from my parents because my mom had been a Fulbright Scholar. And my parents took us overseas when we were younger, so I was always eager to go as a student. American University only had one or two international programs, and I needed a program where I could get all the credits to transfer and support my double major. My college roommate went to IES Abroad Vienna, so I might have heard about it from her. I wanted a program that wasn’t constraining, that didn’t view this as a chaperoned tour experience where you weren’t allowed to go off campus. I wanted to be an adult, and if I skipped a class and went to Scotland for the weekend, that was my choice of a learning environment.

IES Abroad: What are one or two of your most impactful study abroad memories?

MR: Another girl and I shared a tutor for an economics class. We met with the professor periodically and read and wrote papers in between. It was like an independent study class. I remember before going that I had this impression, and we were told, that Americans were behind the Europeans academically and we had to be prepared to work harder. So when we began this tutorial class and one of the books the tutor wanted us to use was one I had used in my sophomore year at AU, I thought, “Well, they aren’t so far ahead of us after all!” 

We coalesced into groups of people we shared a flat with. Early on, one of the girls had to back out of the lease for the flat, and none of us had any extra money. We really needed to replace her.  We tried a variety of options to find another roommate, including going to the LSE and looking at the roommate board where we found a guy to take her place. He moved in, and he actually became one of my closest friends for decades. I returned to London year after year after college and stayed with him and his wife.

IES Abroad: How did you change most during your time in London?

MR: Traveling on your own and going to a program like IES Abroad helps you understand that you can figure out things on your own, you are an intelligent person, and you can make things work, no matter where you are and whether or not you speak the language. So there is that level of self-confidence you gain. And it gives you a great perspective on the U.S. and explodes certain viewpoints you have. It was great as a junior to get away from my college friends who thought they knew who I was when I was still figuring that out. One thing was that I didn’t like my name “Martha.” So when I went to London, I said “OK, now I can change my name,” and everyone in London called me “Marty.” So now I can tell when someone met me—before or after my time in London—by what they call me. I’ve been “Marty” ever since!

IES Abroad: In what ways did study abroad influence your career path? Were there skills learned while abroad that were particularly useful as you embarked on your Federal career?

MR: It was all very helpful because all the classes were comparative studies. It was about how the different European systems – economics and law – compare to the U.S. and how they do things differently. I really wanted to live overseas again, and I never did make that happen because I got into a career path and it became kind of like golden handcuffs to remain within the Federal system. I’ve been with the government for 36 years. When I finished my Master’s degree, I looked at the private sector, but it made more sense to stay within the Federal system. Once I decided to stay, I was focused on my career. I spent 10 years in the White House in the Office of Management and Budget with Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton before I came to the NSF. The fact I had classes at the LSE was a big deal on my resume, and I knew and worked with people who got Masters degrees from LSE. Becoming independent and having a different perspective on the U.S. was a really important outcome of study abroad. I had this idea before study abroad that other places had to be better than the U.S. Living in London and traveling later for an extended period to Australia and New Zealand, I realized there were many ways that the U.S. was actually ahead of the curve.

IES Abroad: You’ve been at the National Science Foundation for nearly 20 years, serving as CFO since 2010. What is the mission of the NSF and how did you get your start?

MR: The mission of the NSF is we fund basic research at American colleges and universities and help build the scientific infrastructure in this country whether it is in people, facilities, or knowledge. If you look at NASA or the Department of Energy – they do mission-oriented research. They fund the mission they are trying to accomplish, whereas we fund all non-medical scientific research. The NIH funds the medical research. We do everything else – zoology, astronomy, anthropology, math, physics, cybersecurity – any type of fundamental basic research. We’re trying to increase the knowledge base and discover and understand what we don’t yet understand. What’s great about NSF and why I came here is the mission is a simple one to understand and support. We have an essential impact on the welfare of this country.

IES Abroad: As CFO you oversee a budget of $7.5 billion (FY16), resulting in 11,000 awards supporting 350,000 U.S. research scientists and students annually. Tell us about your role.

MR: When I came the NSF, we had a $3.4 billion budget. We have doubled the budget in 20 years. As CFO, I have an organization of about 150 people, and we’re in charge of the fundamental business process that underlies what we do. Out of the whole budget, we send 94% to the research community. We have scientists who decide how that money is awarded. My organization is the one that makes the awards and legally obligates the government. I oversee the budget staff who request the money from Congress and allocate it, the grants officers who actually make the awards, and then those who financially oversee the awards and make sure the money is being spent appropriately at the academic institutions. It is the business of the agency that I oversee. Because most of the projects are awarded over a three to five year period, the outstanding portfolio we are managing this year is actually about $28 billion for over 42,000 active awards.

IES Abroad: What are the biggest challenges in your role at the NSF?

MR: To continuously improve operations and meet new legal requirements that come out of the White House and Congress. And to help fight reports in which our science investment is taken out of context and retitled to be a sound bite to make it look like the taxpayers are being fleeced, when they haven’t even talked to the scientists doing the research and understood the value of their work. We always have to clearly communicate the value of the investment we are making.

IES Abroad:  What was the value of working at the White House in the Office of Budget and Management (OMB)?

MR: I was there for 10 years, and when I saw that the budget director job at the NSF came up, I asked a budget examiner at OMB if she thought I’d be good at it.  She told me she thought I’d like it as long as I would be comfortable being a “second-class citizen,”  because if you don’t have a Ph.D. you’re just not considered to be on par with the rest of the senior staff. But my attitude was, after 10 years in the White House OMB, I had a post doc in Federal Budgeting. There weren’t a lot of people at that point who knew as much about the budget as I did. So I came to the NSF knowing more about the Federal Budget than the whole budget division combined (I hope they don’t read that!). The OMB job made it possible for me to become the CFO here.

IES Abroad: The research funded by the NSF transcends U.S. borders with the potential for catalyzing breakthroughs impacting the entire world. How important has having an international perspective been for you professionally?

MR: The former CFO, in conjunction with our Inspector General, started an international accountability workshop. For years, I have been a member of this international community of people who are responsible for overseeing the business aspects of awarding money to the research community. I have been to Paris and Oslo, and we’ve hosted here in Washington, DC. We have very close ties with our Irish, British, EU, French, Hungarian and other counterparts. NSF is considered the premier research funder in the world, and many organizations come to us to find out how we do things from a science perspective, a business perspective, IT systems, processing of proposals – how we manage the business of research investments. For example, I went to China to talk about how we do things. Both the Chinese NSF and the Irish NSF were predicated almost entirely on our model. Science is international, and the “business” of science is also international. I have colleagues and counterparts all around the world.

In so far as a physical presence abroad, some examples would be our astronomy facilities in Chile and the operations in Antarctica at the South Pole, as well as our international ocean drilling program, all of which support scientific research.  We also maintain overseas offices in Brussels, Tokyo, and Beijing.

IES Abroad: When you look back over your career, what are you most proud of?

MR: Looking across my career, I’m very proud to have been an analyst for the White House OMB, and that gave me a great bird’s eye view of the government and politics. That created the framework and context for me. The work ethic was intense, and I realized if I could succeed there, I could succeed anywhere. More recently, at the NSF, we participated in the annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey where they take the temperature of what people think about their job, their bosses, and their workplace. Across 320 components throughout the Federal government, our unit – the Office of Budget Finance and Award Management – came in 5^th as a best place to work in the Federal government. I am very proud of that.

IES Abroad: What advice do you have for students today who are interested in studying or interning abroad?

MR: Don’t think twice – just do it! Today’s students have so many options at their fingertips. In some ways, it may be more difficult and more expensive to study abroad, but through the internet, students can connect with so many wonderful programs. I remember even back in the 80s when I took an extended trip to Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji that I had to write a letter to a B&B on the South Island of New Zealand to get a room reservation. You couldn’t afford to make the phone call, and there was a 16 hour time difference. Now you just get online and search for flights, read reviews, and make reservations! Back then, travel was like stepping off a cliff, and today it is much easier in many ways. Study abroad is a huge opportunity to put your country and your own life in perspective, think about where you fit in the world, and grow up! London was one of the best parts of my college career.

With a strong urge to reconnect with his heritage and learn Italian, Chris Marianetti didn’t hesitate when he saw an opportunity to study abroad in Milan. His life was changed forever as a result. Studying music composition from professors who were themselves students of some of the great European composers of the 20th century had a profound effect on him, and Chris began developing his own voice as a composer for the first time. After graduation, he returned to Milan to work with IES Abroad students and met his Italian wife, a law student and IES Abroad resident assistant at the time. Upon returning to the U.S., Chris co-founded Found Sound Nation, a music collective and network focused on making a social impact, which was a take-off from an elementary school music project he had worked on in Milan. In 2009, he was selected as Artist-in-Residence for Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute, where he worked on a new musical outreach initiative. Then, in 2012, with his Found Sound Nation co-founder, they won a grant from the U.S. State Department to launch OneBeat, an international collaborative and youth engagement-facing music festival and exchange that is now in its fifth year. Read on to learn more about how the IES Abroad Milan experience influenced Chris’ life and his belief in the power of exchange.

IES Abroad: How did you hear about IES Abroad and what motivated you to study in Milan?

Chris Marianetti: As a child, I had a close relationship with my grandfather, Oliver, whom I can sort of describe as American-Italian. Oliver was born a U.S. citizen to recently immigrated Italians settling in Montana, but after the death of his mother was immediately sent back to Italy where he was raised in a Catholic orphanage in Tuscany. Before he was 20 years old, he immigrated back to the United States during one of the major immigration waves in the 1920s. I can remember very early on, even in middle school, wanting to learn Italian in order to be able to communicate with him on that level. He passed away before I finished high school, but my first year of college, I had the chance to take Italian classes and took a bus to a different college at dawn every morning to do so. If you knew how terribly traumatic transitioning to a waking state is for me, you would realize how badly I wanted to learn Italian; I am not a morning person. Nonetheless, I spent two years learning the language, and when I was a junior at Macalester, I saw an IES Abroad opportunity to study in Milan. I didn’t hesitate. 

IES Abroad: What are some of the most influential memories from your time in Milan as an undergraduate student? 

CM: I lived with two Sicilian brothers and another much older American student who had come back to college later in life. To be honest, I might have learned just as much from my fellow American roommate, living outside of his country, as I did from the Sicilians. Milan was one of the first and more potent examples of the power of exchange – how leaving your culture and living someplace outside your context of comfort plunges you deeper into the very culture you’ve left. The separation is illuminating. Like the act of mediation, silencing your own internal communication and leaving your daily thoughts and patterns, you reveal yourself to yourself.

IES Abroad: How did you change the most during your time in Milan? Did the experience shape the way you think in a profound way today?

CM: My studies in Milan, specifically music composition, had a profound effect on me. I grew up in a relative music desert in New Mexico. My college had a potent but small music program, so the chance to connect directly with historic and contemporary Italian music scenes was tremendous. Learning from professors who themselves were students of some of the great European composers of the 20th century was an incredible opportunity. As a composer, this was one of the first moments where I felt I started developing my own voice. Before this, I wrote a lot of pretty derivative works, working mostly from within romantic or jazz traditions, but in Italy I found techniques that helped me to reveal a much more personal musical perspective. 

IES Abroad: After graduating from Macalaster College, you returned to Milan to continue your studies in music at the Civica Scuola Di Musica, and then you worked with music students at the IES Abroad Milan Center. How did your previous study abroad prepare you to live and work there? 

CM: Several weeks after graduating, I packed all the belongings I could fit into a portable piano case, along with a digital piano, gave away everything else, and left for Milan. The very first day back in Italy, while at IES Abroad Milan reconnecting with former professors, I met the woman who would later become my wife, an Italian IES Abroad resident assistant studying law at la Cattolica. (When we married years later in Puglia, our celebration turned into something of an IES Abroad reunion with friends and staff from those years.) I was incredibly fortunate to have studied with Dr. Roberto Andreoni (Roby), and his generosity both as a composition teacher and as Center Director helped set the stage for the career I have today. Dr. Andreoni saw that incoming American IES Abroad students were intimidated by the conservatory system and hesitant about taking advantage of some of the courses being offered at the Civica Scuola di Musica. He gave me a job at the Center where my experience in the program and my language skills could be beneficial to new students. I organized events for incoming students, curated weekly music listings, helped translate the Civica’s website into English, and accompanied students on performances. 

IES Abroad: Upon returning to the U.S., you co-founded Found Sound Nation, a music collective and network focused on making a social impact. What inspired you to establish this organization and what is its goal? 

CM: Our organization is a collective of artists who leverage the unique power of creative sound-making to build bridges that connect people across political, cultural, and economic divides. We believe that engaging in music creation is an important way to unlock the creative potential of youth, to give voice to underrepresented communities, and for creative leaders in civil societies to develop inspiring ideas for building more peaceful and harmonious societies. Not only were the artistic seeds of the organization developed during my studies in Milan, but my relationship with New York new music organization Bang on a Can, who have been our great mentors and partners for the last seven years, began there as well. 

While I was working with Roby in Milan, he connected me to an elementary school in need of music programming, and I began a project working with Italian elementary students. At the time, I was studying composition and electronic music at the Civica Scuola di Musica. But I wanted to find a way to somehow connect more advanced musical concepts from these studies with much younger students – to encourage young people to reach for something just outside their grasp rather than pandering to musical sensibilities. I had students record ‘found sounds’ and objects within the school that had specific timbres (a sonic scavenger hunt), then categorized these sounds and created a library of the recordings. We projected visualizations (waveforms) of these sounds on a large classroom wall and collectively composed short pieces one sound at a time by having students listen, locate sounds on the wall-projections, and place them within a timeline. As we repeatedly played these sonic-amalgamations back, short little cohesive compositions started emerging. I remember Dr. Andreoni being surprised by what we were able to make together. Several years later, while living in New York, I used this model and these experiences to begin Found Sound Nation with a friend and colleague, Jeremy Thal. There are some very clear threads between our current work and that very first project at the Italian elementary school: the power of collaborative creative composition, the importance of musical exchange, and the art of listening. The art of listening extends far beyond the practice of making music – it is one of the major ways we can become aware of the beauty, tragedy, and hidden potential present in our neighborhoods, institutions, and families. 

IES Abroad: In 2009, you were appointed Artist-in-Residence for Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute. How did this come about and what was your role? 

CM: In 2009, Carneige Hall’s Weill Music Institute was beginning a new musical outreach initiative under the leadership of Manuel Bagorro, who, in addition to being a gifted pianist, had managed for the last ten years to run one of southern Africa’s largest music festivals under the eye of Zimbabwean despot Robert Mugabe, which, all considering, was no small feat, indeed. Manuel’s vision was to create a music exchange program in New York where composers and musicians worked in places throughout the boroughs that had hitherto been bereft of substantive musical programming: hospitals, community centers, youth detention centers, and homeless shelters. Working with Manuel and Carnegie, we created audio production and composition labs with people young and old, but worked mostly with incarcerated youth in Brooklyn and the Bronx. During these composition and production laboratories, we also brought in jazz and contemporary musicians from a number of exceptional New York-based groups, to perform and create songs with these young people. These workshops – and the resulting concerts held inside these detention centers where staff, other young detainees, parents, and family members gathered to celebrate the creative spirit and awesome potential of these young men and women – were some of the more powerful examples of music’s ability to transcend situation, place, bonds of culture and race and to speak somehow directly to the soul, revealing to us of the humanity, the utter complexity of it all, that we share living together on this planet.  

IES Abroad: One of the projects you are currently working on is OneBeat, an initiative of the U.S. State Department. How did you and Found Sound Nation get involved? 

CM: OneBeat began with a missed email. Luckily for me, ‘the purge’, while indeed horrifying, involves the digital cleanses I force upon myself and sometimes reveals a buried, hidden gem or two. Here in my backed-up inbox, as layers upon layers of junk and unanswered emails were finally clicked and sorted, I saw a message announcing that the U.S. State Department had a ‘call for proposals’ out that involved the creation of a new international music exchange program. I remember I called up my partner, Jeremy, and told him to come over straight away. The deadline must have been fairly imminent because he slept on my couch over the next week, and we devised a proposal. Truth be told, the call gave me an incredible feeling of synergy because we had, for the last year, been dreaming up a vision for a new kind of collaborative and youth engagement-facing music festival and exchange. Our program involved bringing young musicians (ages 19-35) from around the world to the U.S. for one month each fall to collaboratively write, produce, and perform original music and develop strategies for arts-based social engagement. We sought to employ collaborative, original music-making as a potent new form of cultural diplomacy. Several months later, we were told of the award but couldn’t believe it. 

In the past four years, OneBeat has performed in over 20 cities and towns across the U.S., collaborated with thousands of students, teachers, organizers, and leaders in U.S. schools and community organizations, and upon returning home, OneBeat Fellows have independently raised over $250,000 for post-OneBeat projects using musical collaboration to encourage meaningful cross-cultural dialogue and build peaceful, harmonious societies. As one of the co-directors and creators of OneBeat, I’m truly proud of our network of musical and social innovators, and I feel incredibly fortunate to get to continue to work on this initiative with amazing musicians the world over and with our very adept partners at the State Department. 

IES Abroad: For more than ten years, you have traveled all over the world making music composition, production, and education your career. What drives you, and what are some accomplishments you most proud of? 

CM: My work emphasizes a mobile, accessible, and collaborative way of composing and producing music. I feel as though the field I’m working in, while steeped in tradition, is actually still being created and defined, and I don’t know quite what to call it – sonic-production-composition-education-exchange – perhaps the German language has already some hybrid word for this. Regardless, I feel as though there are new techniques we are developing all the time, often by jumbling up and combining art music traditions, musique concréte, hip hop, audio-journalism, and contemporary composition. I like adapting to different environments, finding the unique sounds and resonances of each space, drawing upon talents of musicians of a particular local scene, and examining issues most relevant to specific communities.

IES Abroad: What words of wisdom do you have for today’s aspiring musicians and the impact of gaining an international experience?  

CM: I’m not ready to answer that! But I will say that I believe firmly in the power of exchange, and I’d encourage it in whatever form possible, be it super local, international, scientific, or linguistic, and for people of all disciplines. Take these opportunities of exchange whenever and wherever they come, and seek to actively create them in your life. I’d also share a few words that have always rung true to me. John Cage reminded us that we have to “create the space” within which our own music can exist and thrive; Joe Campbell challenged people young and old to “follow their bliss”; Anne Bogart emphasizes the importance of sheer action in a “heady” unpredictable world of art. Also there’s a particular passage from Hermann Hesse’s advice to a young poet that I’ve just read and love, and I think, while specific to poetry, applies to many other disciplines: “To follow the way of the poet, not simply to practice the use of language but to learn to know oneself more profoundly and more accurately, to advance one’s individual development farther and higher than the average of mankind succeeds in doing, through setting down unique and wholly personal psychic experiences, to see better one’s own powers and dangers, to define them better – that is what writing poetry means for the young poet, long before the question may be raised as to whether his poems perhaps have some value for the world at large.” I believe this revelation of self to one’s self, is a wonderful outcome of cultural exchange as well. This drives much of the work we do at Found Sound Nation and OneBeat.

From summers in Mexico City as a child to summers in Paris in high school – study abroad was a given for Johanna Oliver Rousseaux. During her junior year in Paris, Johanna sought out opportunities to speak French with locals and fit in. Determined to stay as long as she could, she secured a summer internship after the program finished and was offered a job with the company after graduation. But within months of her moving back to Paris, the company went under and Johanna found a job that would keep her in Paris but didn’t set her up for the international career she sought. Ultimately, Johanna returned to the States to pursue a law degree, convinced she would immediately go back to Paris afterwards. Instead, determined to regain her Spanish fluency, Johanna headed to Costa Rica after law school for an internship at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and then began working at the Arias Foundation. Intending to stay for only a year or two, Johanna’s plans changed drastically when her boss died suddenly and she was asked to take over the project he had led. She remained in Costa Rica for five more years, working closely with Oscar Arias, the former president of Costa Rica and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Returning to the United States after six years abroad with no professional network proved difficult, but in the end, it was her language skills and cultural understanding – critical for an international case – that landed her full-time work at the law firm of Jones Day. Today, Johanna serves as Of Counsel in the Global Disputes practice and works on several of the firm’s pro-bono projects, which bridges her unique skill set and background. In our interview, Johanna shares the story behind her journey from nonprofit to litigation and explains how her experiences abroad shaped her path all along the way.

IES Abroad: Why did you decide to study abroad and what drew you to Paris?

Johanna Oliver Rousseaux: There was never any doubt that I would study abroad – and I never even considered a semester – it was always going to be a full year.  I can’t really remember a time when I wasn’t drawn to life abroad and all things international. My mom will tell you it is her fault and my dad’s that I have this “international bug” because I was born in Germany while my dad was stationed there in the military – even though we came back home to the States before I was three months old. Then as a kid, we spent our summers at my grandfather’s house in Cuernavaca, outside Mexico City, where he had worked for many years. I was tutored in Spanish during the year so that I would be able to play with kids in the neighborhood and otherwise get by when we were there. Sadly, we stopped going to Mexico probably around the time I was eight or nine, and I was left with my fluent “little girl” Spanish. Then, a few years later, France came into the picture. My parents had divorced, and my dad had met my stepmother, who I consider the quintessential European – she was Austrian, had studied at Cambridge, but lived in Paris, and spoke five languages. I started spending a few weeks to a month each summer at her house in the suburbs of Paris, where I also got to take French at the Alliance Française. Those summers getting to know the city and the surrounding suburbs also opened up an insider’s Paris to me that normal tourists don’t experience. So I had a real connection with the city. That’s a really roundabout way of telling you that I never picked Paris, I think Paris picked me.

IES Abroad: What are a few of your most influential memories from your time studying abroad?

JR: I was there from 1987-88, and back then, without internet or cable and satellite TV, France and the United States were two very different places. As Americans, we really stood out, which I hated. I wanted to be a chameleon and blend. I wanted everyone to think I was French, but that was almost impossible to do, not only because of the language but because of how we dressed and what my French friends teased was my “tête américaine” – literally my American face. I remember that a group of us all went out and bought these suede jackets that everyone was wearing – we each got a different color, but it was the same jacket. I’m not sure that helped us fit in any better though! Now when I go to Paris and see everyone dressed in jeans and tennis shoes and baseball caps – like I would see on any street in any city in the States – I realize how much the cultures have melded. But back then, it was really a question of us trying to fit in and how different the cultures were. The French students our age seemed like such grown-ups compared to us. As part of the IES program, I went to “Sciences Po” because I was a political science major, and there was this guy that used to walk around with these dress shoes, pressed jeans, a buttoned-down shirt, a cardigan on his shoulder, and a pipe in his mouth! (I guess, the pipe would explain the ashtrays built into the desks…) There was just this whole different level of formality that we really weren’t accustomed to as U.S. college kids. I also remember sort of bungling the formalities when I worked that summer. The company was basically the equivalent of a tech start-up, so most people working there were fresh out of school and just a few years older than me. Every morning they would gather in the lounge area for a coffee and when I would walk in I would do this very American generalized wave and “bonjour.” And every morning, the VP of the company would see me do that and yell (kindly) “No!” The he would make me walk around and properly greet every single person, either with a kiss on the cheek or a handshake. I kept on thinking one day the formality would fade and I would get away with my wave, but it never did. That is very French, and it’s still that way today – proper greetings are an essential part of how life works there, and I think it’s pretty neat, even if it seemed so excessive to me at first.

IES Abroad: What were some of the biggest challenges you faced studying abroad, and how did you overcome them and grow as a result?

JR: When I studied abroad, my stepmother was in the States, but she still had her apartment in the Paris suburbs, so I lived there with a couple of girlfriends. It was really fun. We had this huge flat and a lot of freedom, and other students studying around Europe would come and stay with us – we even did a big Thanksgiving weekend gathering. There were people in the building who I had known for years who kind of looked out for us, but we didn’t go home every night to a French family that helped us work on our French during a formal family dinner or that taught us things about the city or life in France. We had to fend for ourselves in terms of opportunities to learn about day-to-day life. Fortunately, I had learned a lot with my stepmother in my previous visits, so we actually lived like French people in a lot of ways. For example, we would go to the fresh market held twice a week and buy food, which became this really great thing because we built relationships with the vendors and could observe so much there. We also had to work hard to find opportunities to speak French. It’s not easy to speak French among yourselves, so we had to engage with the people that we came across during the day and use our French in the street, and Parisians are very tough on you and immediately switch to English if your pronunciation is bad, so we had to be perfect. I think living on our own meant that it was more of a challenge for us to make sure we were getting the most out of the experience, but in a really good way.

IES Abroad: You returned to Paris after finishing undergrad and before going on to law school. In what ways did study abroad influence your career path?

JR: That’s all an IES Abroad connection. I had wanted to stay in Paris so badly that I talked to the director of the program at that time, and he got me a summer internship. He was super excited because the guy that he had gotten me an internship with had a champagne vineyard and he assumed I would be working on something related to that. What could be more French?! But it ended up that the guy also had a tech company out in the suburbs where he wanted me to work. I spent the summer there and made amazing friends that I am still in touch with today. I left (kicking and screaming) in August to go back to Sewanee for my senior year, but I knew I wouldn’t be in the States for long. The company had offered me a full-time job after graduation, and while I was back at Sewanee, they went about getting my working papers. As soon as I graduated, I was back on a plane to Paris with all of my worldly belongings because in my mind I was never coming home. But within a matter of months, the company went bankrupt and I was scurrying to find another job. As luck would have it, a girl who had gone to Sewanee with me and had stayed in France after our junior year told me that she was leaving her job at a French modeling agency and really wanted to put someone she knew and liked in her job, because she loved her boss. So I took the job. I was in charge of billing for photo shoots, fashion shows, and other work and then paying the models. These gorgeous girls and guys would come in, and I would count out huge cash advances for them because they were in Paris for the weekend and needed to go shopping for a party or wanted some mad money. Talk about being in the middle of an amazing world if you are in Paris! While it was fascinating on many levels, that job was never a career choice though. It was survival choice – it was the job I took so I could stay in Paris.

When I started looking for something more in line with what I wanted to do – which then was mostly some vague notion of international business – the problem I had was that the French people interviewing me would ask, “But what are you trained to do?” Our education systems are so different, and at least back then, French students were trained to do something specific. So when I would say, “I have a liberal arts degree, a bachelor of arts,” they would scoff and tell me that was the equivalent of a baccalaureate [high school] plus two years. I felt like I was never going to get credit for my education or my experience up to that point. Law school had always been on my mind, but I hadn’t found a really compelling reason to go. After my disappointing job search, I figured that if they wanted to know what I could do, why not go to law school and then come back with an answer. So, I studied for and took the LSAT and did all my law school applications while still living in Paris and eventually decided to go home to Austin and law school at The University of Texas. It never even occurred to me that, when I finished, I wouldn’t turn around and go straight back to Paris.

IES Abroad: After receiving your J.D. from The University of Texas, you served as a legal intern at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in San Jose, Costa Rica. What led you to Costa Rica, and were there skills learned in Paris that you were able to draw upon?

JR: When I left Paris, I was completely fluent in French and even spoke with a Parisian accent, which still today is one of the accomplishments I’m most proud of. Back then, I still could understand Spanish, but I couldn’t really speak it, and I remember my dad would always say, “When are you going to get your Spanish back?” Over the course of law school, I had become much more focused on working in international law, so the whole “go back to Paris and show them what I can do” thing kind of fell by the wayside. During my last year in law school, I was the Editor-in-Chief of the Texas International Law Journal, and we organized a symposium with a number of panelists, several of whom, coincidentally, had contacts in Costa Rica. At the same time, one of my classmates had studied abroad in Costa Rica and offered to put me in touch with the school he had attended. It all just kind of came together that Costa Rica seemed like a good option. One of the contacts worked for the Organization of American States and, when I followed up with him, he told me he had arranged an internship for me at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. So, I signed up for this school my friend told me about, got on a plane, and flew down to Costa Rica thinking I would go for a year or two to nail down my Spanish. I knew I had to live and work there and be part of the culture – just like I had in France – to get my Spanish to the level I wanted.

When I got to San José, I was the only student in my school, and I was assigned to live not with a local family but with my teacher, which basically meant that I was constantly working on my Spanish with her. After a couple of weeks, with my Spanish flowing pretty well, I went to the Court of Human Rights to check in and discuss the details of my internship, but they had never heard of me. Fortunately, I was received by a really nice American lawyer who was working in the legal department, and he said, “I don’t know what or who you are talking about. I’m not aware of any arrangements, and we already have an intern. But actually, that person no-showed. So, you’re more than welcome to the job if you want it.” That got me working, which helped my Spanish improve exponentially. I also followed up with the other contact I had in Costa Rica who was at the Arias Foundation. He had a project to create an international law institute that would focus on a South-South dialogue among Latin America, Africa and Asia in an attempt to counter the conversation that, at the time, was dominated by the West. That was right up my alley, so once my internship at the Court of Human Rights was over, I agreed to work on another project he was running while he figured out how to launch his international law institute. That is how I ended up at the Arias Foundation.

IES Abroad: You went on to become a program officer at the Arias Foundation, founded by Oscar Arias, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and former president of Costa Rica. What led you to this work, instead of immediately becoming a practicing attorney?

JR: After about six or eight months of working on this project at the Arias Foundation, I started to get restless because there was no forward motion whatsoever on the international law project. The project I was on was primarily academic – a comparative study of the causes of conflict in the third world. Although it was interesting and I was learning a lot about the recently ended civil wars and other unrest in Central America, it really wasn’t a legal project at all. I had planned to stay as long as two years, but I also was aware that I didn’t have much of a window in terms of getting back on track with my legal career, so I started to think about returning to the States. Right about the time I was considering some job offers from law firms back in Texas, the man that had hired me was killed while traveling within Nigeria for a work conference. It was horrible – the plane had crashed in a lagoon, there were even rumors that it was shot down, and everyone on board was killed, including several people from our project, government ministers, and oil industry executives. When that happened, one of the leaders of the Foundation pulled me aside and said, “We don’t know what this comparative study is that you are working on, but it’s with really important international donors, and we need you to see it through.”

I ended up in Costa Rica for another five years, which was never my plan. But that gave me the chance to work closely with Oscar Arias, who is amazing and who I am privileged to count on as a mentor. At the time, he had just finished his first term as President of Costa Rica, during which time he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. He created the Arias Foundation with the Nobel prize money, and it was really active in the region working on peace and development issues and other public policy initiatives as part of the wind down of the various conflicts in the region. It was fascinating work at a critical time in that part of the world. And once I began running the comparative study, I weaved in as much international law as I could, focusing on the role of the UN and the OAS and the many international efforts to end the wars. All in all, it was an amazing experience. I really went off track in terms of how people normally push through a legal career, but I wouldn’t give up that experience for anything.

IES Abroad: How did you make your way back into “mainstream” legal work and eventually make your way to Jones Day?

JR: Through a very humbling, character-building experience! When I moved back to the States, I didn’t have a lot of contacts, and I was struggling anyway with whether I wanted to try to be a “real” lawyer or stay in the non-profit world. I spent two very tough years in Miami and then moved to DC and started working as a contract attorney while I got my bearings and figured out what I wanted to do.  As luck or fate would have it, Jones Day was my third contractor assignment. My first two assignments had been pretty demoralizing – crazy hours stuck in huge workrooms in basements with dozens of other people who for the most part weren’t much better than drones. But walking into Jones Day felt different from the get-go. First of all, they specifically needed Spanish speakers, so I knew I had a real chance to shine. And we were working directly with the legal team, at the firm, not at some satellite or third-party site. For whatever reason, back then it was hard to find litigators with language skills. I think most lawyers with language skills go into transactional work because they think you need the foreign language when you are making the deal.  But they forget that you need it just as badly or even more so when that deal falls apart! 

It ended up I was brought on for one of the biggest international cases of recent times. Within about eight or nine months, Jones Day hired me as a full-time associate. That was 12 years ago. So, like with the modeling agency in Paris, and the Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica, I was in the right place at the right time and just landed on my feet. I worked on pretty much nothing but that one case for over ten years. But I was able to do it – and I think this is what is important – not just because I was able to speak the language, which is critical, but also because I understood the culture. I’ll never forget that in one of my annual reviews, one of the more senior lawyers called me the “case team ambassador,” because I was the one who really was able to bridge that gap between us and the people in Latin America who we were working with, whether they were our co-counsel, witnesses, experts, or just people that we had to interact with to get what we needed for what we were doing. A few years ago, when Jones Day opened an office in Miami, I was asked to move down and help develop the firm’s practice in Latin America, so that knowledge of language and culture is still one of my most valuable skill sets.

IES Abroad: You also lead a pro bono project within Jones Day's Rule of Law initiative that researches civil and human rights issues and prepares training materials for lawyers in Latin America. What inspires you to do this work?

JR: I have always had this tension: I loved the case I was working on and the work that I was doing, but I also am really from a public interest background because of the years I spent at the Arias Foundation. The opportunity came up to do these human rights manuals, and it just so happened that they had to do with a country that I was very familiar with and had visited on numerous occasions, always staying among the locals and seeing their day-to-day struggles first hand, and not ever really doing the tourist thing. I was selected to lead that project because I had this unique connection to the country but also because the project really took advantage of all of my experience at a non-profit where you are focused on facilitating things and creating training materials and spreading your knowledge base to other organizations. It was just a natural fit. Now we also are doing a big project that involves representing the kids that are coming from Central America and crossing the border into the United States without their parents – “unaccompanied minors” as they are called. Again, that is something that I have been able to get very involved in helping design and oversee because people recognize that I have the background that I do. I’m really lucky that my firm’s commitment to pro-bono matches my own philosophy and drive to do that kind of work and that I’ve repeatedly been given a leadership role that takes advantage of my other, non-lawyer skill set.

IES Abroad: What advice would you give to students about studying or interning abroad today?

JR: If you are passionate about an international career or working and living abroad in the future, you have to do a deeper dive during your study abroad experience. Even if you are just there for a semester, you have to do more than just the program. You somehow have to engage in a way that really invests you in the community and that really teaches you the culture. Because speaking the language, or thinking you speak the language, is only a very small part of it. My being able to navigate cultural differences was as important, if not more important, than my language abilities. Nowadays, most foreign professionals are fluent in English. They either studied in the United States or Canada or Europe and they don’t need you to speak their language. But boy does it help! Because generally they would rather speak their own language, and it endears you with them in a lot of ways once you can – you will bond differently with them than the folks who are connecting only in English. But take that further step and know their culture, and you will be really far ahead of the curve, because no matter what language people are speaking, they don’t lose their culture.

Studying abroad will change your life forever, no matter what. It already is such an amazing thing that makes you dig just a little bit deeper inside and shifts your comfort zone. That’s a huge checkmark on the list, but if you want to stand out, you have to do more. It is so hard for Americans to compete, especially in the international organizations because there are so few open positions – most of those organizations have quotas and simply don’t hire that many Americans. But even in the private sector, you really have to get out there and have something that sets you apart. And you have to be willing to do things that are a little bit different, a little bit scary, especially at the very beginning when you are young and resilient. Take those risks early on while you can because they will pay off in the end.