July 16 - Today's guest blogger, Ryan Hicks, is a student of the University of Alabama and a summer intern at the U.S. Consulate in Nagoya. Ryan is majoring in geography (focus on geographic information techniques) with a minor in Japanese. To learn more about the State Department's student intern program, please visit http://careers.state.gov.

Jim

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Interns in the Embassy and Consulates

Every year in early July, American Embassies and Consulates help celebrate Independence Day. On July 2 this year, our Consulate in Nagoya hosted a reception for 300 people using the theme of aviation.

Aerospace is of huge and growing importance in the U.S.-Japan relationship, particularly here in Nagoya where American and Japanese companies are working together to develop the next generation of airliners.

Interns are often asked to do routine or even boring tasks, so I never dreamed I would be setting up a real airplane inside a major hotel's central ballroom. Preparations began more than a month beforehand. Hundreds of emails, phone calls and face-to-face meetings with aerospace firms eventually resulted in an impressive collection of aviation displays. The "centerpiece" was an entire American RV-4 kit plane, kindly provided by the College of Naka Nippon Aviation.

The success of the event owed much to the fact that everyone did their part to maintain the flow of communication. The decorations were not only impressive in themselves, but were real symbols of cooperation both between the Consulate and donors and between the United States and Japan. The efforts of dozens of people the world over made it all possible. I’ll never forget working on this amazing project.

- Ryan C. Hicks