Finding Opportunity in Personal Career Crises...

As a young woman in foreign policy, I’ve been fortunate enough to have an exciting early career working on international climate policy, security threats, and political campaigns. Like many, I’ve had detailed career goals and incredible mentors that helped guide me to where I am today: a doctoral student at the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow with the Center for Climate and Security.

But everyone has moments in their life when a shock comes along, upsets all their carefully made plans, and sends their careers spinning off in an unknown direction. For me, that personal career shock just happened to coincide with massive upset to U.S. politics and the world: the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in 2016.

I’d just spent over a year and a half working my heart out in the other direction, as a member of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign staff -- pulling all nighters at Campaign Headquarters as primary election results rolled in, jetting to battleground states for debates, and collaborating with colleagues across the country. We were fighting for Secretary Clinton’s vision of a world where people prospered together, no matter where they were born. It became my next goal to help implement her vision of a strong, globally-engaged America which would lead the world to solve our most pressing challenges.

These ambitions built on my early career steeped in the minutiae of international diplomacy on these topics. From 2010-2015, I had been in the middle of United Nations negotiations that created the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement, working first as a youth delegate at global conferences, then as an issue expert for the International Institute for Sustainable Development, and later for a dedicated team at the U.S. State Department. This hands-on experience with diplomacy at such a young age taught me that global goals are not easily achieved, no matter how worthy. It took years of persistence and negotiation among Ambassadorial titans (most of them female!) to craft a short list of goals that the entire world could agree to. These diplomats had to both make a plan for the future that can inspire the world, but to also be creative and flexible about how they got there.

Now unemployed and with my career goals askew, I had to draw on these lessons while I scrambled to find a new plan. No longer could I pursue my dream of serving in the U.S. government to advance climate change or sustainable development solutions; instead, we had to fight like hell from the outside to prevent serious backtracking. So I asked myself -- what global challenges would define my future career working in international relations, and what did I most care about working on? After a few months, watching in horror as decades of American climate leadership and diplomatic expertise were dismantled by the isolationist Trump Administration, I found a compelling answer to my question. We are living in an increasingly chaotic and dangerous world, where both climate disasters and authoritarian leaders are growing in their disruptive power. Taken together, these threats could undermine the last 75 years of global progress, leaving a more polarized and competitive world in their wake. None of the agreements or goals that I’d helped craft at the United Nations stood a chance if they couldn’t be resilient to a changing world.

I threw myself into researching this nexus of climate change, global governance, and security threats, first at the Truman National Security Project, and now at Oxford at the Center for Climate and Security. Along the way, I’ve developed my expertise into how governments can prepare for and prevent the dangers posed by climate change, and pushed myself to imagine what new institutions we might need to confront these threats head on. As the COVID-19 crisis has made abundantly clear, without strong international cooperation in the face of transboundary risks, our societies will suffer.

I’ve also picked up important life lessons in the course of this experience. Resilient people, like societies, have ambitious goals, but are also open to change when surprises or disruptions come along. Our generation will no doubt be working in a turbulent world for the rest of our careers, and we can’t let any single shock, upset, or moment of unemployment knock us down. Instead, we can find the opportunity in those personal crises to reexamine the issues we are most dedicated to, rethink what society needs, and take chances on new ways to achieve our goals. And while we likely won’t ever have happy memories of the shocks that left us reeling, we’ll perhaps be grateful for the opportunities that we found in them.

Kate Guy is a researcher and policy advisor, studying how climate change shocks will impact national security, geopolitics, and world order. She worked for Hillary Clinton's Presidential campaign.