Katherine Torres, now a rising senior at the University of North Georgia, never thought about a career in foreign service before last year, when she attended the Cox-State Department Diplomacy Seminar. The program, sponsored by the Una Chapman Cox Foundation, an organization dedicated to recruiting and retaining foreign service officers, aims to expose underrepresented students to potential careers with the U.S. Department of State.
Now Torres is waiting on security clearance for her new internship with the Department of State. When Torres participated in the seminar, she and her peers did an exercise where they simulated responding to a global pandemic as foreign service officers. The irony isn’t lost on her. That moment piqued her interest. 
“To be completely transparent, I had no idea what the Department of State even did before this seminar,” Torres said. “So, this was amazing to find out about all these international careers I didn’t even know existed. The experience completely changed my career track.”
The three-day seminar, which started in 2018, usually brings 28 selected students together for a fully-funded program in Washington D.C., where they meet and network with foreign service officers in small groups and go through a diplomacy simulation, which shows them what it’s like to be an ambassador overseas.
The first year, there were 250 applicants. The next year, 500. Applications are now open for this year’s seminar, a five-day virtual event from Oct. 18 through 22, held in partnership with the U.S. Department of State and the CloseUp Foundation. Applications, due Aug. 26, will be reviewed on a rolling basis, and applicants will be notified of their acceptance by Sept. 18.
Though the format of the seminar has changed, the goal remains the same: to introduce minority students of all majors to these fields, in a setting where they get individualized attention from and quality time with foreign service officers.
For Torres, one of the key takeaways was just “how many different channels” there are to foreign service work. For example, her roommate, an engineering major, learned about STEM-related jobs at the Department of State during the program.
