The following are fictional portraits of three future Academy students. The portraits help show the kinds of students who will be attracted to the Academy and how their time at the Academy will shape their lives.
Tonya
Growing up in Atlanta, Tonya lived in a service-minded household. Her father, a postal worker, and her mother, a teacher’s aide, consistently emphasized the importance of serving the community and the country, and young Tonya learned the lesson well. She became a solid student with a stellar record of service throughout her high school career. Most of her service energy was channeled into her school. She became passionate about — her friends might say obsessed — improving educational opportunities for kids in her neighborhood. She started Successful Sisters, an afterschool enrichment program for middle and high school girls, and she turned a moribund National Honor Society chapter into a dynamic organization actively engaged in tutoring and mentoring younger children.
Tonya’s record of service led her guidance counselor to recommend that she look into applying to the U.S. Public Service Academy. Initially, Tonya was a bit concerned by the structure of the Academy program — the heavy load of core courses, the service requirements, and the uniforms all seemed a bit daunting. But Tonya’s parents took her to visit the campus after her junior year, and she fell in love with the school. She was impressed with the students she met there — they were down-to-earth and fun, and they cared. Unlike many of her peers , they cared about making a difference in the world, they cared about the classes they took, they cared about people around them. It was the kind of close-knit environment that she had hoped to find in college. When she returned from her campus visit, Tonya worked with her counselor to get a nomination from Rep. John Lewis, and she earned a spot in the Academy.
An English major, Tonya immersed herself in a variety of tutoring programs on campus, and she adored the Little Sister she had been assigned through the campus Big Brother/Big Sister program. She became an active member of her House’s Residential Advisory Council and was widely known for her spirited defense of student interests. Initially reluctant to participate in the required team activity, she found herself loving the intramural soccer team for which she played — not only did it help keep her in shape, but she also appreciated the camaraderie with the other young women on the team.
When she first enrolled, Tonya knew that she wanted to become a teacher and pursue a career in education. But she also began to cultivate other interests, particularly in activities and fields to which she had never been exposed in high school. She found herself enchanted with Arabic, one of the Academy’s strongest language departments. Although she had never even heard the language before she went to the Academy, she was a quick study. She spent a quarter during her sophomore year as an intern in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs and realized that she had to switch her Public Service Concentration from education to foreign affairs. She spent her entire junior year in Morocco, and for her capstone senior service project she served as an Arabic translator at a local hospital.
Tonya graduated near the top of her class, and she had the pick of foreign affairs assignments. She chose to take a Peace Corps Fellowship, a unique partnership between the Academy and the Peace Corps that allowed her to spend two years in Jordan as a Peace Corps volunteer, followed by three years working in the agency’s Washington office. After her service commitment expired, she Peace Corps experience helped launch her career in the Foreign Service.
Jenna
The daughter of an Army sergeant and a nurse, Jenna grew up in East Texas, about an hour southeast of Dallas. Her parents divorced when she was six, and Jenna lived with her mother throughout her school years while her father moved frequently. She stood out among her peers at the county high school. An active athlete, she also excelled in the classroom, earning a 3.6 grade point average to go along with 1940 (out of 2400) on the SAT. But it was her record of service that truly distinguished Jenna. As an elementary school student, she became an active member of her church youth group, which was led by a service-minded volunteer. Between her parents’ example and the youth group, she came to see service as a way of life. By the time she was in high school, she was the leader of her church youth group and founded an organization called YEP (Youth-Elderly Partnership), which paired high school students with nursing home patients for companionship and mentoring.
When Jenna first read about the U.S. Public Service Academy in her school counselor’s office, she had mixed feelings. On the one hand, she loved the idea of going to a school devoted to service. She looked up to her father and admired his sense of duty to America, though she did not want to follow in his military footsteps — she wanted to work in a civilian field where she could continue the kind of work she had done in high school. She also was attracted to the idea of getting a full scholarship to go to school because she knew her parents were going to have to struggle to pay for her tuition. On the other hand, she did not think that the Academy would admit her. After all, there were only 1300 students per class, from all around the country, and she needed to get a congressional nomination to be considered for admission. She did not know any politicians and figured they would only take people who supported them. Her perspective changed after an Academy recruiter came to her school — he not only convinced that she could excel at the Academy, he also put her in touch with Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison’s office. Sen. Hutchison happily nominated Jenna and was proud to see her accepted.
Jenna enrolled in the Academy immediately after graduating from high school. During her six-week First Summer, she joined her first-year classmates in an intensive project where her team refurbished a playground and built new recreation equipment for students at a local elementary school. That intensive summer experience forged lasting friendships, which proved helpful later that year when Jenna struggled academically. Not used to the fast pace of the quarter system and the intellectual challenge of the Academy’s core courses, Jenna initially had trouble keeping up. She took advantage of the faculty-in-residence program and developed a close relationship with the English professor who lived in the Shriver House with her. With her supportive friends and faculty members watching out for her, she regained her footing and began to thrive.
Originally interested in political science, Jenna switched to economics and chose emergency management as her Public Service Concentration after she spent one quarter doing emergency response training with a Mississippi first response team. She loved her off-campus enrichment experiences. She spent one quarter interning at the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Washington, and two quarters studying abroad in Peru, where she became fluent in Spanish.
Upon graduation, Jenna was assigned to work with the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, which was critically short of Spanish-speaking employees. She spent three years in the agency’s Preparedness Office conducting training for public employees across the state, then spent her final two service years at the central Response Office in Jackson. When her service requirement was fulfilled, she took a year off before deciding to return to MEMA. After working her way up the chain of command, she became director of the agency at age 42.
Bok
Bok was born and raised in Seattle, the son of Vietnamese immigrants who had come to Washington State in the 1970s. His parents established a small business near Pike Place Market, and Bok graduated from the local public schools. In high school, Bok was a strong student, though not the straight-A, valedictorian type. He was best known for his community service with homeless people who lived on the streets near his parents’ business. As a four-year volunteer for a local clinic, he saw firsthand the struggles that plagued the homeless, particularly children. He organized a mentoring program that brought young homeless children to work with high school students after school and on weekends.
His community service gained local media attention, and a staff member in the Seattle office of Rep. Jim McDermott reached out to Bok when he became a junior. The staffer told him about the opportunity of the U.S. Public Service Academy and encouraged him to apply. When an Academy recruiter visited Bok’s high school later that year, the young man became convinced that it was the right school for him. It appealed both to his sense of purpose — he knew that he wanted to lead a life focused on service to others rather than making money — and to his practical awareness of the benefits the Academy offered. He applied to a number of other schools — the University of Washington, Reed College, Brown University, among others — but he did not hesitate when he received his admission letter from the Academy.
Bok excelled at the Academy from the first day of his First Summer. He admired his Team Leader, one of a pair of seniors who were in charge of planning and implementing the summer service project. Like Bok, the Team Leader was from Washington State and planned to pursue a career in health care, and he became a mentor for Bok. As a freshman, Bok pursued a variety of extracurricular activities and discovered a love of the performing arts. He fulfilled his team activity requirement each quarter by being a cast member in a variety of productions.
Health care was Bok’s passion, and at the Academy he pursued every opportunity to learn more about the field. In addition to his major courses in biology, Bok volunteered at a community clinic that catered to immigrant patients. His experience at the clinic reinforced his determination to spend his career in medicine. For his capstone service project senior year, he and a classmate created a home health care training program in five different languages for the clinic’s staff to use with their patients. Already fluent in Vietnamese, he studied Chinese and spent two quarters in rural China. He also spent one quarter as an intern with the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta during his junior year.
After graduation, Bok was assigned to work at a community health clinic in rural Wisconsin, where the director needed a Vietnamese-speaking staff member to meet the needs of the area’s growing immigrant population. Bok worked at the clinic for two years, then applied for a deferral to go to medical school. The Academy offered to pay for his medical school tuition in return for eight extra years of service on top of the three he still owed. Bok was more than happy to agree — he knew that doctors often spent a decade or more paying off their tuition bills and they sometimes even pursued lucrative specialty fields as a way to pay off their loans. Bok graduated from the University of Washington School of Medicine and the Academy assigned him to serve for three years in a Veteran’s Administration outpatient clinic in Yakima, Washington. With his initial five-year service commitment completed, Bok was given the choice of where to serve his remaining eight years. He decided to return home to Seattle, where he worked in the local VA hospital. After several years, he opened a specialty unit within the hospital that focused on mental health care needs of veterans.