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Over the past month I’ve been doing my standard information gathering and noticed that the Foreign Service is disproportionately made up of people from 3 groups: The Peace Corps, The Mormon Church and Minnesotans. Random, huh? Let me explain what I’ve learned thus far. The Peace Corps is perhaps the easiest to rationalize. It exposes them to life overseas for an extended period of time and is a natural progression for a career move when their mission is done.
The Mormon Church puzzled me for awhile until I started doing some digging. I was not aware of this, but a majority of Mormons participate in an overseas Mission around their early 20’s. The mission is 2 years long and they are assigned somewhere random in the world. It makes sense then that being exposed to extended living overseas at an early age would lead more people from that population to look for careers that would accommodate future overseas experiences.
The one that continues to baffle me is the unbelievable amount of people from Minnesota. I’m not kidding, I have met an insane number of people that are linked to Minnesota in some way and I can’t figure out the connection. Nick insists it’s because they want to escape the cold of Minnesota, but I refuse to believe that. Perhaps it’s because we’re an adventurous group or committed to serving a cause we believe in? I just don’t know. Any hypotheses? I’ll entertain any theories because I’m stumped. I guess the research must go on!
Sarah – John and I have noticed the same thing about Morman’s, I didn’t know their mission thing so that helps explain it.
I didn’t know about the Peace Corps thing and your reasoning is sound there.
With the Minnesotans, I had found a few families from MN in different blogs. I find it interesting that we are trying the Foreign Service. Maybe Minnesotans have a strong urge to serve their country – but in a non combatant way. Maybe we’re just more diplomatic. Of course Minnesotans are often quite brusk so maybe we’re not :)
Good thoughts Sara. It is puzzling, huh?