|
|
Laura Pyeatt
Even for the most directed students, the senior year of college can be a waiting game: watching the mailbox for graduate school acceptances, and hoping for job callbacks. But Laura Pyeatt’s postgraduate future has been clear since she was a sophomore, when she won a Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowship. The program, which grooms future diplomats, funds two years of college and the first year of graduate study for students who agree to work at least four and-a-half years in the State Department’s U.S. Foreign Service. For Pyeatt, a political science major with a serious case of wanderlust, committing to that early career path was easy. Her uncle, an anthropologist, had sparked her sense of adventure while she was in high school, when he invited her to join him in his travels in Guatemala. Poverty was visible in Pyeatt’s Appalachian mountain hometown, but the conditions she saw in Guatemala were exponentially worse. Meeting the villagers and traveling the countryside, she began to question the United States’ impact on Latin America. “After that I started thinking about international affairs,” she says. Nevertheless, her course of university study wasn’t a given. Pyeatt, a classical singer who at one time wanted to be a conductor, almost attended a music conservatory. Pyeatt said she chose Boston College instead because she was attracted to the religious ideal: “Of those to whom much is given, much is expected.” She found her place at the University quickly, getting involved in community service opportunities. As an intellectual, Pyeatt stood out to Professor Timothy Duket, who taught her in a freshman honors seminar. “Students are pretty linear in their thinking,” he says. “Laura could think analogically.” Keeping her hand in the arts, Pyeatt took music courses and private voice lessons, and performed with the University Chorale. Once she earned the Pickering Fellowship, her schedule was full year-round. The fellowship required a summer study program following her junior year, in which Pyeatt studied economics, statistics, Chinese-American relations, and policy analysis. Following an internship this summer at the State Department, Pyeatt entered Duke University in the fall to study public policy, then completes the fellowship next summer at a U.S. Embassy internship abroad. Now, with State Department employment approaching, Pyeatt hopes for opportunities to help shape foreign policy. “I want to try to adapt American foreign policy to the real situations of individual countries,” she says. “A lot of people in Washington are making policy without knowing how the countries will really be affected.” Photo: Laura Pyeatt in O'Neill Library. |
