By Adam Fivenson, MSFS’14
Elizabeth Linder, Facebook’s Politics and Government Specialist, is spending the week on Georgetown’s campus as a participant of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy’s 2012 Georgetown Leadership Summit (GLS). This week is a bit of a change of pace for Ms. Linder, who spends most of her time helping politicians and government officials around the world improve their Facebook outreach strategies.
On Thursday, October 25, six GLS participants, including Ms. Linder, had breakfast with current MSFS students to discuss leadership in international affairs and business. Hearing the students’ perspectives was valuable for Ms. Linder: “We had a lively conversation about the public sector, private sector, nongovernmental sector. It was really exciting to hear about the experiences everyone here is collecting, and they’re really going out into society and contributing.”
Casey Dlott (‘13), one of the MSFS students that met with Ms. Linder, came away with a wider career perspective: “I think it’s interesting to meet people who are at mid-career stage and hear how they got there and some of the leadership advice that they have for younger people who are starting out their careers.”
The breakfast was made possible by a generous gift from MSFS alumnus Philippe Sachs, with the goal of supporting a series of activities in the area of student leadership. “The Georgetown Leadership Seminar participants are an extremely impressive group of leaders, and MSFS was fortunate have this opportunity. We hope that students were able to learn leadership lessons that might help them shape their own leadership vision,” said Ashley Koch, Assistant Director of Academic Affairs at MSFS, who organized the event.
Other GLS participants who took part in the breakfast event were Louise Roug Bokkenheuser, foreign editor of Newsweek and The Daily Beast; Emiel de Bont, Deputy Head of Mission of the Dutch Embassy in Tel Aviv; Nomhle Canca who serves at the Chief Albert Luthuli Foundation (CALF) and is Group CEO of One Stone Capital Ltd.; Sherin Farouk Mishriky, organizational development and human resource management consultant for CID consulting; Patrick Robinson, Director of Business and Human Rights for Yahoo!; and Dima Alfaham, Chief of Staff to Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba at the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Embassy in Washington.
The MSFS students who participated reacted positively to the meeting. Third-year student Julia Robbins (MSFS/MBA ‘13), for example, met with Nomhle Canca, who she said “gave [her] great professional advice,” while Dlott said Ms. Linder “was fabulous, it was amazing to speak with her and to discuss leadership across the board. It was really interesting to hear about how she got to the position she’s in and her work at Facebook.”
According to Koch, more opportunities to interact with leaders are being planned for those MSFS students who weren’t able to participate this time.