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Student and Alumni Spotlight

Daniel Evensen

Daniel Evensen was our Flagship student during 2007 – 2009. He was called to speak German when he served in the Munich Germany / Austria mission from 2003-2005, but his desire to learn Mandarin grew with many encounters with Chinese investigators. After his mission, he took CH 101 and kept taking classes until he completed a major in Chinese. He currently works as a Foreign Service Officer for the U.S. State Department. His career focus is the Consular track, but he is currently assigned to work for the State Department's office to combat trafficking in persons as a program officer. His favorite part of the Flagship experience is to explore Qingdao with his wife as an intern, which allowed them to experience a normal middle-class Chinese person’s life.

What Daniel said about his Flagship experiences: “My internship in Qingdao exposed me to what Chinese business culture is really like. This was very helpful for me during my first tour with the State Department, when I worked in fraud prevention in our Non-Immigrant Visa section in Shenyang, China. Having a firsthand understanding of the Chinese art of relationship building and knowing what Chinese companies actually look like from the inside made it much easier for me to detect and deter fraudulent visa applications, helping secure U.S. borders in the process.”