After more than eight years as an employee with the U.S. Department of Energy in Washington, D.C., Malika joined the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), headquartered at the Vienna International Centre in Vienna, in September 2022.  

 

Malika, her husband, Rob (TM ’04) (hey, that’s me!), and cockapoo, Abra, made the transcontinental move last August and have been settling into life abroad. For Malika, joining an international organization is a professional achievement more than 15 years in the making.

 

“No, honey, it started a lot earlier than that,” she says, reading this over my shoulder.

 

“OK, give us the whole story.”

 

“Well,” she says, “it actually started with Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.”

 

“The twins from Full House?”

 

“Yup.”

In 2001’s Winning London, the Olsen twins travel to England to represent their school in a Model United Nations (UN) competition. It was a formative movie that came at a formative time. Malika was a Thomas More freshman on 9/11 and a sophomore when the war in Iraq started.

 

“I always knew I wanted to do something that was connected to international politics,” Malika tells me as she cuts into her Wiener schnitzel. “I wondered how things were done in other countries and wondered why that was something I needed to care about.”

 

In spring 2003, she asked the editor of TM’s school newspaper – hey, that’s also me – for the opportunity to write a column outlining what students needed to understand about the war in Iraq.

 

“My classmates and I were having this conversation every day,” she says, “and I thought that people were really oversimplifying the issue.”

 

During her first semester at Marquette University, a friend told Malika about a last-minute opening in the school’s Model UN club, and, like foreshadowing in one of those direct-to-video Olsen twins movies she loved so much, she immediately knew she needed to join.

 

“There’s this delegate dance in Chicago,” she explains as she continues to work on this seemingly endless schnitzel, “and in the middle of the dance, they stop the music and announce that there’s an international crisis, and the Security Council must report to a conference room to solve the problem. I was like” — she gasps — “it’s like in the movie!”

 

Art mirrors life – and life often mirrors art. After graduating from Marquette, Malika worked on a statewide political campaign and served as an AmeriCorps volunteer before enrolling in the international public affairs master’s program at the University of Wisconsin. When a fellowship opportunity with the Department of Energy in D.C. came her way, she recognized it as the next logical step.

 

After completing her fellowship, she worked as a government contractor for one year and was federalized in 2016. As a Foreign Affairs Specialist, she traveled internationally on a regular basis, visiting more than 15 countries to work with international partners. In 2019, she completed a two-month U.S. embassy rotation in Beijing. The opportunity to work with – and observe – how governments work in partnership on the critical issue of nuclear security was one of those “dream becomes reality” moments for her.

 

“Working in a mission-forward organization like the IAEA supports that connection to figuring out what drives me,” she says, long after we’ve realized there’s no end to this Wiener schnitzel and we’ll need to take the leftovers home (“Entschuldigung, zum Mitnehmen, bitte?”). “Working towards a shared goal with people from different backgrounds every day is exactly what I was looking for – even before I had the words to articulate it.”

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Living abroad is, said simply, a blast. Since arriving in Austria, Malika and I have visited Scotland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, and, like those distant mountain peaks, see many new adventures on – and above – the horizon.

 

Sometimes, it feels like we’re a long way from home, but then we remember that we have a shared history – and a shared memory – to fall back on, and it brings us closer together – and closer to home.