Up close and personal with Washington's diplomats

Boettcher Scholar Colton Arciniaga (BA ’24) says his summer internship in Washington D.C. was an experience that every Korbel student dreams of.

“It’s the one that everyone's always talking about and wants to get,” he says. 

Before his senior year, Arciniaga landed an internship with the U.S. Department of State in the Office of Mexican Affairs and spent several months in the district rubbing shoulders with foreign service officers, a group of U.S. diplomats and civil servants in the State Department. He worked in part as a control officer, helping to plan the itineraries of high-level government officials visiting Washington.

On one such assignment, Arciniaga got to attend a Senate Foreign Relations Committee meeting.

“I sat right in the room right behind [Senator] Kyrsten Sinema,” he recalls. “Getting to actually take notes and be there in a room with some really senior-level staffers, officials from the Mexican embassy in D.C. and our ambassador to Mexico, was a really fascinating experience and not one a lot of college students get to have.”

Arciniaga received lots of guidance from his State Department colleagues about working in the foreign service, including advice about the very real challenges that come with such a career.

“It's different type of lifestyle,” he says. “It’s a very intensive, almost all-consuming lifestyle, because you basically live and revolve around your work. To get to hear their advice on how to manage that, and how to have a great experience while being in that type of environment, was really impactful.”

When Arciniaga was a high school senior, he received the Boettcher Scholarship, given to just 50 college-bound students across the state of Colorado. He says the scholarship changed his life, allowing him to gain access to the diverse and supportive community of professors and peers he has at DU.

“I certainly wouldn't be here today without the opportunity of having the community that I was given through receiving the scholarship,” he says.

Arciniaga says, thanks to his time in the Capitol and his Korbel courses, he’s learned that working in diplomacy is about more than attending receptions and galas or meeting high-profile people—it’s work that can take you all over the world, even to the more dangerous places across the globe.

And, as Arciniaga notes, the work is basically nonstop—but it’s something he feels like his time in the district and his courses at DU have prepared him for. And he’s looking forward to it.

“A lot of our professors have that type of experience or know, tangentially, that world—but I also got to see it in person,” he says. “There were times when I was doing 50-hour weeks, and I was expected to do that as a member of the team.”

During his time in Korbel as an undergrad, Arciniaga also got the chance to pursue a different kind of foreign policy opportunity while working as a research associate under Collin Meisel and Jonathan Moyer at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures, a University of Denver Research Institute.

“I was on the literature review team, helping different teams in the center answer different questions through analyzing literature and giving them background for a number of different projects,” he says.

Arciniaga finished his undergraduate degree this spring and will be pursuing a master’s in international security as part of Korbel’s 4+1 program, a decision made easy by his experience in Washington. And there’s a good chance his life after school will look similar to his time spent in the nation’s Capitol.

“After all these experiences I've had, I really want to continue in the foreign policy realm—and I'm strongly considering the foreign service,” he says.