This spring World Dip meets with WVPU Associate Director Dr. Samuel Schubert to get an inside look at his life before working in academia.
By Bridget Carter
April 2019
I meet with Dr. Schubert on a Monday afternoon. It’s a cold, gray day and the reverberating traffic serves as a backdrop to his office of family photos, book shelves, and stacked papers. I listen as he reminisces on his former years before working in academia. Clad in suit-and-tie with an espresso in hand, he recounts working on projects for multiple UN organizations wherever there was a demand.
“The international civil service is a very specific kind of life,” he describes. “This created a very international lifestyle.” A very specific kind of life, indeed.
Missions abroad
Schubert’s work took him to politically sensitive areas working as a UN missions expert in Jamaica, Sri Lanka, and varying countries in Africa and the Middle East to promote and build intermediary governmental institutions. His missions focused primarily on development work for which knowledge of computers and telecommunication technologies were essential.
Traveling from Vienna to the field with UN bluebook in hand, there was one specific goal in mind: “to leave behind a sustainable operation,” he says. The job usually involved spending months preparing for a specific mission abroad; once there, he could expect to be on the ground between three weeks and three months.
“The international civil service is a very specific kind of life.”
Adaptation: key skill
This involved a great deal of adaptation, so much so that he recommends this as being one of the key skills for working in international civil service. “It’s about adapting and trying to understand how you get into other people’s shoes,” he says. He notes that constant adaptation both to new environments as well as the transition back home is inevitably part of the job and essential for success.
Now on his second espresso, he rhetorically asks the existential questions: “What are people’s issues, values, and dreams?” How does their world look to them?” And perhaps we, too, should ask these questions more often.
Today, working in a very different world of academia, Dr. Schubert is well-known by WVPU IR students for his narrative-style of teaching and rigorous courses on International Relations Theory, Middle East Area Studies, and Terrorism.
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Bridget Carter, the Co-Founder of World Dip magazine, is an International Relations graduate student at Webster Vienna Private University where her areas of focus include gender dimensions of migration and post-conflict development. Her background in the field of forensic science and journalistic writing give her a unique perspective from which to approach various topics of international relations. Her written work has been featured in Austin Monthly magazine, The Chronicle, and The Ten-Twenty. She also rocks her own blog: There She Goes Travels. Bridget has trekked the southern Himalayan Region, sailed the Mekong River from Thailand into Laos, and traveled and lived in her 1986 Mini-Cruiser camper in the desert of West Texas. Her grit and passion make her one hell of a story teller.
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