Changing His State of Mind

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Last May, Zach Sturman stepped off a plane and into an Eastern European city rife with palpable political tension.

Just a little earlier that month, the three Baltic members of NATO – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – had asked the organization to send them each thousands of ground troops to prevent further hostility from Russia. This call for military support came after months of Russian aggression toward Ukraine, which resulted in Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula.

The tension within the Baltic states would play a major role in Sturman’s summer, which he spent working in Estonia’s U.S. Embassy as an intern for the U.S. Department of State.

“My application essay for the internship was geared specifically toward Estonia and what’s going on there with increased Russian aggression and NATO relations,” says the junior political science and Spanish double major and astronomy minor, who got the internship with a scholarship from the Harry and Reba Huge Foundation. “My internship was focused on politics and military, so, pretty much every day, I had something to do with NATO or Baltic operations.”

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