Notes from the Field: Jacob Greenberg ’17

Jacob Greenberg '17 interned at the U.S. Embassy in Zagreb, Croatia during the 2015 fall term with the support from the Mr. E. John Rosenwald Jr. '52 Public Affairs Fund.

"One method for the U.S. Department of State to globally implement American foreign policy is by establishing a representative mission to a country with whom we wish to have diplomatic relations, usually via an embassy that is led by an Ambassador," Jacob says.

Going into his internship, Jacob hoped to achieve a more comprehensive “understanding of how the US implements foreign policy through embassies and members of the Foreign Service.”

As an intern in the political and economic sections of the American Embassy in Zagreb, Jacob’s responsibilities included monitoring the treatment and numbers of Syrian refugees, forecasting the impact of multiple outcome scenarios for the parliamentary national election, drafting talking points in support of the TPP, and creating educational presentations on American culture and life for Embassy members to present to the public at large.

Jacob describes the first day of his internship as “being thrown immediately into the deep end”; Croatia was pulled into the Syrian migration crisis as Hungary closed its boarders redirecting refugees and migrants into Croatia, parliament dissolved itself, and a new Ambassador had just arrived. His immediate superiors were out of the office to attend crisis control meetings all across Europe, which left him to technically be the ranking member of the economic section for the day.

Jacob recalls visiting the Slovonski Brod Refugee Camp with his superiors and a congressional delegation in order to check on the humane registration of refugees along with the status of tents and heating equipment the US had donated as the seasons turned from fall to winter as the most rewarding part of his internship.