From Designer to Diplomat

My unlikely road to becoming a career diplomat, with Roots & Wings along the way

Whenever someone finds out what I did before entering the foreign service (or whenever I tell my old branding or screenwriting clients why I can’t take on new projects any more), there tends to be a surprise in the inevitable reaction—namely, “How did that happen?”—that I find daunting to satisfy.

The simple answer is that my mother-in-law saw an ad for the 2019 exams and thought I might be a good match for it. Also, I was told it was the toughest examination in the country and couldn’t resist taking a crack at it. Also, I had just recently married a doctor and thought maybe “diplomat” paired better than “designer.” Also, I had been starting to feel constrained up having been working from home for seven years by that time. And on goes the list of absolutely true reasons that are also ways to evade having to tell the entire story of why I decided to pick up diplomacy at 35 after a decade and a half in the creative industries.

I give myself the exact same litany of reasons to avoid that very question, to be fair.

When I grow up

Growing up, I never really knew what I wanted to be. My dad had been abroad for all but a handful of weeks of my early childhood, so I put down “pilot” when they asked us in preschool. Had they asked why, I would've said something about that strange magic of watching people disappear into, or emerge out of, NAIA Terminal 1.

Everything else that interested me in childhood was a matter of “strange magic.” There was the strange magic of luxury items in Sky Mall catalogues. There was the strange magic of “the World Tonight” and “Japan Video Classics.” There was the strange magic of back issues of the New Yorker from the used book shop at our palengke, talking about politics and cultural scenes I had absolutely zero context for. I especially loved that one Ferrero Rocher commercial where the chocolates were in a pyramid, being served at an Ambassador’s reception. 

I loved all of it. I longed so much to understand any of it.

I could have wanted to “go abroad” like dad did, of course. The impression you got was that going abroad was where you’re supposed to want your life to go, as what exactly being largely incidental. And we had been able to live that “Filipino Dream” (i.e. to pack up and live anywhere else) as an immigrant family in Canada for three years in the nineties until family obligations trumped custodial work and forklift operation.

Out of either patriotic fervor or plain contrarianism, I didn't pay the prospect of going back much mind. In fact, I hardly paid any prospects for a life-long career-path much mind at all by the time I entered my thirties. Not that I’ve been idle—I’d won an international marketing award, co-founded one of Southeast Asia’s most prolific digital art studios, and had rebranded a bank by then. I had an animated series in the works like I’ve always wanted, greenlit for a second season. Sure, I didn’t really get to go on planes like I may have wanted to as a child, but wasn’t the whole point of Creative Process Outsourcing earning US American greenback dollars without having to leave mom with dad in Cavite City?

Even then, that preschool question continued to hound me like a word I’ve both forgotten and yet never actually knew: what did I want to be when I grew up? 31 and still, I was literally asking myself that very question.

“Roots & Wings” connections

I took my first solo flight abroad when I was 31. I had recently been folded into Roots & Wings magazine, and Ms. Rachel Hansen, RaW-Mags’ publisher, had commissioned me to extend my services to the 2nd European Regional Overseas Filipino Conference. The event had been for a handful of days in Malta, but my stay in Europe had been generously extended by Ms. Rachel and the Filipino Community in Europe for the better part of three months: the first two having been spent mostly under the unsettling sunlight of a Stockholm summer and the last month backpacking cluelessly from Rome to Paris.

I owe the rest of my adult life to this magazine, unequivocally. I met my wife on that three-month escapade, realizing that I did in fact want to share the happiest days of my life with a friend of 12 years while traipsing alone through a secluded church piazza in Venice. I reconnected with my artist father, whose dementia had been partly why I cofounded our company as a 100% online operation, among his old masters in the Louvre. Most relevant to this story though, it was the first time I’ve ever met diplomats. Also the first time I’ve ever smelled pot (Amsterdam, obviously) and the first time I’ve ever been mugged (twice, by the same gang of teens, in two very different parts of Berlin).

Meeting diplomats and leaders of the Filipino diaspora in that conference had presented me with a new category of thing to be. I met ambassadors, consuls, Filipinos in multilateral organizations (who warned me against taking a job with said multilateral organizations at the cost of my soul) and foreign policy consultants. Many lent hours of unforgettable conversation. Some even lent rooms and meals during my meanderings through the continent.

For all my youthful dismissal about going abroad, I suppose there is something fundamental about venturing out into unknown lands that stirs a Filipino mind. Meeting all of these kababayans from every walk of life, doing incredible and interesting things, and exchanging ideas with them opened me up to ways of being. I flew back to the Philippines with my mind racing with possibilities, excited to expand my horizons beyond digital art and branding and within a few weeks of returning home, my life did change forever.I started dating the girl I married.

One thing after another

We had our first date at the National Museum. We’ve been there several times before but I admitted that it was a date at the room with the Botong Francisco Murals. That was 2015. We got engaged in 2016 and got married in 2017, mostly while still co-running my company and doing branding projects and largely forgetting about the diplomacy thing. Well, just mostly.

From 2015 until the time I joined the Service, I’d been a designer and associate editor for Roots and Wings, assembling Filipino stories across Europe for publishing while covering European events in Manila for the magazine. I’d like to think that those years taught me how to mingle with diplomats in formal functions, which they most certainly did. I would also like to think that those years taught me how to dress and groom like a diplomat in formal functions, (but they unfortunately did not.)

It was at the tail end of our first year of marriage when my wife’s mother suggested that I take the foreign service exam. I had not been actively considering a career change. Neither she nor my wife had been anything other than supportive of my career and business either. It had been a musing sent via Facebook Messenger that I took seriously for five minutes, forgot about, and later remembered just soon enough for me to submit my application at the last possible moment (I may literally have been the last applicant on the last day of applications in 2018.)

How to become a career diplomat

Our Foreign Service Officers’ Exam was a gauntlet of five examination stages lasting one to three days, spread across the span of one year with days, weeks, or months of nerve-wracking anxiety in between. I understand they’ve since reduced the number down to four.

The first stage, the Qualifying Exam, is essentially a Civil Service Exam. Or, for those who have never done a Civil Service Exam, more or less like a College Entrance Exam with an 80% cut-off. This exam pared our batch down to less than a fifth. My dad died shortly before I received the news that I passed and placed fourth.

There had been a preliminary oral exam before the big, three day written exam back in 2019 but that seems to have been taken out. Perhaps the Board of Foreign Service Examinations figured it was better to let examinees concentrate on the three days of nonstop pen-scratching awaiting them. It was the “a little bit of everything that happened before, everything going on now, and everything that might happen tomorrow” nature of this test that hooked me into trying it out. 

I wasn’t confident enough with a foreign language other than English to look forward to that part of the exam, but I figured I knew enough German for an exam designed for fewer takers (Spanish, as I later found out, was much more demanding). Note to takers: a clear head, a flexible wrist, and staying hydrated during the exam is much more valuable to this exam than anything you can glean from last minute cramming. 

Then, there is the Psychological Examination, a battery of IQ, personality, and diagnostic tests plus face-to-face interactions with psychologists to answer the question: “are you psychologically fit to work for the government?” To clarify, the answer you would like to receive from this examination is “yes.”

Finally, there are the Oral Examinations. Less than a tenth of us remained at this point, each one of us submitting ourselves to be judged by panels and observers and, come to think of it, each other. I’ve had to answer why a designer would want to be a diplomat a handful of times during our two-day orals, perhaps wondering why anyone would leave home-based, self-employed corporate work for public service (“oh yeah, good point, why WOULD I do that?” I reply, five years too late).

The last round of Orals involved an extravagant formal dinner with extravagant formal dinner guests flanking each one of us examinees left and right, asking us (me) if anyone had ever taught us (me) formal social etiquette (no, I was born and raised in extraordinary social isolation, but I am very eager to learn.) Part of that dinner involved fishing a topic out of a bowl and coming up with a dinner speech extemporaneously while a room full of seasoned extemporaneous speakers stared you down for the impostor you are.

My dinner topic was about being the Ambassador to Thailand after the ASEAN Summit and so I talked about how the Summit had succeeded in bringing together and building strong ties of cooperation between the Eleven members of ASEAN.

Eleven members of ASEAN. Eleven members of ASEAN. Eleven members of ASEAN.  I had been working on speculative logos for the SEA Games earlier that year and the eleven rings of the SEA Games logo was so vivid in my mind that I kept repeating it in my speech. Eleven members of ASEAN.

ASEAN has ten members. Or it does, until this November.

How to actually become a diplomat

Had I failed, I would likely not have known until January, marking an entire year after the Qualifying Exam. I passed, despite myself, by the Grace of God. I just needed a list of simple-enough clearances and medical check-ups and I was well on my way to start a whole new life, finally away from my work-from-home comfort zone.

Truly, I was ready to step out and face the world in that truly life-changing year: 2020.

I did not get to start work until 2021. My first few months in the service had been work from home. My six-month cadetship training had been entirely on Zoom. Our “Department of Foreign Affairs Day” group performance, a rite of passage for new diplomats, had been in an online game. Even then, that had been the state of the world the year I started with Foreign Affairs so that was what the work entailed. And when the world began opening back up, the work did too.

Since then, life has been a blur. Partly, it was because of the overwhelming honor of being able to bring my creative background into this avenue of service: rebranding the Department of Foreign Affairs social media ecosystem, exhibiting my work at the UN Headquarters in New York and the Osaka World Expo. Designing the UN 80th anniversary commemorative stamp for the Philippines and launching it at the Botong Francisco Mural Room. I was even served a Ferrero Rocher at an ambassador’s reception once!

Unfortunately, it’s also partly because I feel my eyesight has been declining since 2023.

I think I may have joined the service a bit later than I should have. I was told, day one, that I was probably starting at too old an age to reach ambassadorship before retirement. Fair enough, if that was necessarily the case.

Ten years after joining Roots & Wings and going on that unforgettable journey—ten years after my first brushes with diplomacy and the Filipino diaspora—I think I’m ready to say that what I’ve wanted to be when I grew up was exactly where I am now: a Filipino diplomat.

Telling the story of my people around the world, defending their interests and promoting their well being while forging friendships on their behalf with all the peoples of the world - all I really want is to still be doing that in the event that, God forbid, I ever do grow up.

Applications for the 2026 Foreign Service Exams are open from 15 September to 30 October! Visit https://tinyurl.com/3e7tmvza for more information!

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Marthy Arguelles Angue is a Filipino diplomat currently serving as a Third Secretary for the Permanent Mission of the Philippines to ASEAN. His “dilang anghel” is that ASEAN will expand beyond 10 members during his posting. He is also a designer, writer, and game developer, co-founder of the digital art studio Gunship Revolution, and has been a member of Roots & Wings Team since 2015.