Jamie Moore

Jamie Moore ’10

Gresham, Oregon
Political Science

After Mac: Cultural diplomacy intern at the British embassy in Washington, D.C.; applying to graduate school in international affairs

After my first week at Macalester (and several discreet “Where is…” searches on Google), I had drawn a mental map associating my classmates with the dozens of countries where they were born, grew up, or attended school.

As someone for whom those three places were the same, I found the international diversity of Macalester simultaneously exciting and overwhelming. The Macalester I had wished for, where people from around the world discuss and debate world issues, actually exists.

In my History of Warfare class, we studied the Mexican- American War (or the War of American Invasion, depending, as always at Mac, on your perspective). I was fascinated by conversations in class between a student from Texas and one from Mexico, who had grown up exposed to very different views on the conflict. In my Humanitarianism and World Politics course, there were students who could relate to nearly every angle of the subject we studied. While we discussed controversial subjects, my classmates and I consistently showed respect for each other, no matter how different our views.

During class discussions, I no longer automatically associated my peers with the map in my head. My roommates came from three different continents, but I no longer thought of them as “the girl from Sweden” or “the girl from South Africa.” We came from different countries, but we were all Macalester students.