Miriam Fugfugosh (MAIPS ’03)

Miriam Fugfugosh (MAIPS ’03) says that one of her favorite things about the Monterey Institute is the atmosphere of warmth and welcome that she felt throughout her time there—“from the first day of orientation to graduation.” She appreciated the closeness with other students, and the staff and faculty who found time to interact with the students as individuals. “We were all recognized for who we were and valued for it,” she says and adds that this sense of family has extended to her life in Geneva, Switzerland, where MIIS faculty and staff bring the alumni community together for interesting conversations when they are in town.

Miriam came to MIIS after serving in the Peace Corps in South Africa, looking to build on her experience and build a career promoting peace internationally. While on an International Professional Service Semester assignment in Geneva during the spring of 2003, she met her future husband Jan. Together they travelled to Bolivia to volunteer for an NGO in El Alto for most of 2004. Since April of 2005 Miriam has worked at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP), realizing her dream for a rewarding and challenging professional career.

“I am fortunate that I have had the opportunity to work on myriad projects, with various colleagues, and in different locations including Mali, Jordan, Guinea-Bissau, Belgium, Slovenia, Austria, and of course Switzerland,” she shares happily. Her work at GCSP, an international foundation funded mainly by the Swiss Confederation, has involved training mid-career government officials working in the field of security policy. “I am pleased to have found a post in which I interact directly with the beneficiaries of our projects and get to work towards international peace and security through training of decision-makers.”

Miriam and Jan live in downtown Geneva with their two sons, Ahkyan (3) and Ezekiel (1). Some advice Miriam has for young professionals, is to take care to nurture networks and people skills: “These are as important as the academic tool kit!” She also encourages students to master the non-required practical skills such as using Excel and statistics, and says she has seen promising newcomers held back at times for not having those basic skills.

William Scott Wilson and his mentor Ichikawa Takashi (and his grandchildren) at Magome, Japan.

Sometimes life is what happens when you are busy making other plans, as John Lennon so famously observed. William Scott Wilson (BAJS ’73, SILP ’74) came to the Monterey Institute of Foreign Studies (as MIIS was known in the early decades) in 1970 to master Chinese, but ended up switching to the Japanese program. Searching for a good translation project for his thesis he discovered Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai by the 18th century warrior Yamamoto Tsunetomo. Explains William: “It really got me!”

After graduating he moved to a farmhouse in Japan with his two children, with the intention of continuing the translation that began as his thesis. “It was probably a little crazy for a single parent,” he shares, adding that he had come into an inheritance that helped fund this adventure. His translation wound up in the lap of a large Japanese publishing house. “The chief editor told me that this was an important book and they wanted to publish it but that it would not sell,” he tells us laughingly. The book was published in 1979 and has never gone out of print since. It has been a hit among martial arts enthusiasts as well as a cult classic after it was featured in director Jim Jarmusch’s film Ghost Dog starring Forrest Whitaker as a hitman who follows its teachings strictly.

“I got really lucky,” says William modestly, despite being hailed by the American Literary Translator’s Association as “today’s foremost translator of classic Samurai texts.” He continued translating for the same publishing company for thirty-five years from his home in Florida, including a 4000-page novel that consisted of nine volumes in Japanese that took him close to three years to complete. “Monterey was a good place to live,” says William, fondly recalling the small cottage his family lived in and the buckets of squid that fishermen gave eternally hungry students for free. It was also the beginning of a very good life and rewarding career.

For more stories of Monterey Institute alumni check out the online version of our alumni magazine, the Communiqué.

Panelists from the Center for Advising and Career Services briefed SILP students on career opportunities in the language field.

For many students, the Monterey Institute’s Summer Intensive Language Program (SILP) is a gateway to advancement along their individual path, whether their next destination is a graduate program, further language study, or a return to their professional career. The bottom line is, in addition to opening up new opportunities for intercultural communication, language acquisition is a resume builder.

During a July 17 campus information session, students in the 2013 SILP program received an in-depth briefing on career opportunities in the language field. Staff members from the Center for Advising and Career Services presented a panel addressing language acquisition for career exploration, sharing their experiences working with multi-lingual students as they enter the workforce. A student and alumni panel followed, featuring students who have graduated or are currently attending the Monterey Institute sharing their experiences working in a career utilizing their languages. Participants in the latter panel included Kaydee Dahlin (MBA ’09), Timothy Ditter (MAIPS ’14), Kaley Grimland (MAIEP ’08), Natalia Vasilievna Zoubko (MATLM/MATI ’11) and Larisa Makshanova (MATLM ’12).

Craig Middleton (MPA ’87) at the Presidio.

“You could say it is any MPA‘s dream project,” says Craig Middleton (MPA ’87) of his leading role in establishing the Presidio Trust in 1996, a federal agency that manages the Presidio of San Francisco, a national park site that previously served as a military post under the flags of three nations. The Trust was, and remains, a unique agency. The law that created the Presidio Trust presented a potentially risky challenge for its leaders; it gave the trust until 2013 to become financially self-sufficient or the Presidio would be sold off.

“This had never been done before and we needed to be inventive,” says Craig of the transformation of the Presidio into a place that welcomes the public. He was the Presidio Trust’s first employee and, as executive director, recently celebrated the important milestone of achieving financial self-sufficiency for the Presidio.

After graduating from MIIS in 1987, Craig went to work for California Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. During his more than five years in Washington D.C., he had a front seat to many of the most pressing US foreign relations issues of the time, such as the response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. He was part of the first U.S. human rights delegation to visit China after the Tiananmen Square massacre, and worked with the Congresswoman to broker the bi-partisan deal to transform the Presidio into a national park with minimal cost to taxpayers.

To reach financial independence, the Trust leadership developed public-private partnerships to rehabilitate and lease the Presidio’s buildings, many of which are historic. Major tenants include Lucasfilm, the Disney Family Museum, and several nonprofit organizations. The Trust also leases about 1,200 residential units. This arrangement is far from traditional, but for Craig it is totally in line with the pragmatic, goal-oriented focus of his education at the Monterey Institute. “I feel the school really prepared me for what I am doing now,” he says. He especially appreciated the combination of intellectual rigor and pragmatism, and the opportunity to work with people of diverse backgrounds and with different points of view. “A lot of what I learned at MIIS has served me well in my career.”

Heather Bessette (MBA/MAIEP ’12)

A year after graduating from the Monterey Institute, Heather Bessette (MBA/MAIEP ’12) is celebrating her promotion to associate marketing manager at Rosen Convergence Marketing, a Portland company dedicated to “help purpose-driven companies do more good with less.” Combining researching sustainable companies and practices with marketing perfectly fits Heather‘s professional ambitions and the skills she gained through her joint degree in International Environmental Policy and Business Administration: “I couldn’t be more happy to use both aspects of my degree,” says Heather, who attended Middlebury College as an undergraduate.

“‘Be the Solution‘ rings so true to me,” Heather says referring to the Institute‘s motto. She is doing her part by working to promote socially and environmentally responsible companies effectively. Originally from upstate New York, Heather says that she visited Portland to participate in the NET Impact conference in 2011 as part of the active NET Impact MIIS chapter and fell in love with the city. “I decided that Portland was the place for me,” she says, happily adding that the city is “a real hotspot for sustainable thinking.”

So in short; dream career – check, dream location – check. Heather’s advice to goal-driven graduate school students is to “get involved with as many projects as you can while still in school.” It really makes a difference, she says, to take advantage of every opportunity to apply what you are learning. Picking the right projects also matters and she says that she draws a lot on her capstone: “I didn’t know how real it was until I started working in the field.”