Foreign affairs, diplomacy and JMU's first-ever Rangel Fellow

Political Science and International Affairs alumna Isabella Santos (’25) returned to Capitol Hill for the third time in four years, this time as JMU’s first-ever Rangel Fellow.

The highly competitive Charles B. Rangel International Affairs program offers funding for master’s students in exchange for five years of service in the U.S. State Department. For Santos, the success she cultivated early on at JMU through internships and hands-on experiences shaped her subsequent opportunities.

“Every scholarship, fellowship, and internship I’ve ever gotten was because I worked with the Career Center,” Santos reflected. “I worked with the Office of Fellowships and Awards, the Writing Center — I had meetings with them constantly for anything that was remotely important.”

Santos first became interested in Asian studies during her freshman year through a general education English course on Asian literature with Dr. Debali Mookerjea-Leonard, covering history, culture, and politics. That course laid the groundwork for the fall of her sophomore year as a study away student with the Washington Semester Program.

That fall, Santos interned for U.S. Representative Ami Bera — chair of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia at the time — primarily handling his foreign affairs portfolio. She attended congressional briefings, prepared briefing binders, and drafted daily news bulletins on the different regions in Asia for the subcommittee. The following year, Santos was a legislative intern for the Senate of Virginia and then a press intern for Senator Tim Kaine.

“Washington Semester was probably what gave me the most career and professional skills,” Santos said. “All the internships and professionalization I was able to do after that were because of the skills I gained in D.C., especially because I did it so young.”

Hands-on projects were also a key factor of Santos’ post-grad success, including Dr. Bernie Kaussler’s (professor of Political Science) and Dr. Hala Nelson’s (professor of Mathematics) “Hacking for Diplomacy” course within the Diplomacy and Defense Lab.

The course, sponsored by the Diplomatic Security Service that year, tasked students with creating a proposal for non-lethal security systems for use at U.S. embassies abroad, and included trips to Virginia’s Quantico Marine Corps base and the U.S. Embassy in Costa Rica.

She recalls that at one point she “was generally interested in the State Department but didn’t really know what the Foreign Service did or how to get into it,” but “after talking to them a lot, and asking a lot of questions about what their process was like, it truly changed everything for me.”

Santos is pursuing her master’s degree in international relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in the heart of Washington, D.C., and hopes to work in South Asia as a part of the U.S. Embassy in the future.

Santos noted that “there are many opportunities out there, but you have to be willing to cast a wide net. Having JMU support makes it easier.”