International travel and a desire to help others fueled an interest in public service careers for Maxwell School graduate students Julia Liebell-McLean and Mael-Sanh Perrier. While Liebell-McLean spent 18 months living in Saint-Louis, Senegal, teaching English as a Fulbright scholar and freelance instructor, Perrier’s experiences include an internship in France, a deployment to Haiti with a humanitarian organization and a month teaching French and English in Vietnam.

Perrier and Liebell-McLean are pursuing dual master’s degrees in public administration and international relations and are the Maxwell School’s latest recipients of Robertson Foundation for Government fellowships.

Robertson awards are among the most generous and prestigious available to professional graduate students at the Maxwell School, covering full tuition for two years of study, a living stipend, health insurance and assistance in finding a summer internship. In exchange, fellows agree to work in the U.S. federal government for three of the first seven years following graduation. Since the program began in 2010, the program has funded 39 students, including Liebell-McLean and Perrier.

From New Jersey, Liebell-McLean graduated from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in culture and politics, and minors in French and francophone studies and African studies. While pursuing her degree, she interned remotely with the Office of Central Africa, a subsection of the Bureau of African Affairs in the U.S. State Department. She drafted activity reports and biographies for foreign dignitaries and helped plan trips for senior diplomats.

That experience along with the nine months spent in Senegal in 2022 furthered an interest in international affairs that Liebell-McLean held since childhood. Growing up in a town with a large first-generation population, Liebell-Mclean was exposed to diverse backgrounds from an early age.

“I was sort of jealous of my friends who got to travel abroad to visit family, and it made me curious to live outside the U.S. and become familiar with other cultures and nations,” says Liebell-McLean, who also studied abroad in France during high school.

Liebell-McLean looks forward to the mix of classroom instruction and experiential learning opportunities to provide the skills needed for her career. She is especially interested in diplomacy, security studies, the francophone world, and West and Central Africa. She hopes to work for the U.S. State Department, perhaps as a foreign service officer. She says she likes the idea of “getting small things done every day,” and being “accountable to ‘the people.’”

“I was raised with the Jewish value of tikkun olam, or ‘mend the world,’ so I think those experiences helped instill the idea of service as well,” she says.

Perrier was born in the United Kingdom and raised in New York City. After high school, he took a gap year to travel; in addition to France and Vietnam, he visited China to study martial arts. He then attended the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he spent three years in the Army ROTC program. He interned with the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations and was a strategic partnerships intern for the city of Atlanta.

Perrier put his academic pursuits on hold for one year to join Americorps as a full-time teacher’s assistant in the education department of a youth mental health facility. He became a therapeutic drumming instructor, helping children develop healthy coping skills. During that time, he also joined the international humanitarian organization Team Rubicon, which deployed him to Haiti in 2021 to assist with an emergency management operation in the wake of an earthquake. He helped manage a medical team, worked with health organizations and helped with interpretation efforts.

He returned to college in August 2022 and earned a bachelor’s degree in materials science and engineering, with a minor in Middle Eastern and North African studies in December 2023. He aspires to work in the field of homeland security, helping underprivileged communities build emergency management capabilities and resilience into their infrastructure.

“I'm a naturalized immigrant, and I want to give back to this country and serve our people as thanks for all the opportunities I've had,” he says.

By Mikayla Melo