"The Middle East conflict becomes very real when you know the faces on the ground," says John Musselman. The places John Musselman has called "home" are ones that most Americans know only through newspaper headlines. When John was a baby, his father's job took the family to Khartoum, Sudan. John learned Arabic as a kindergartener in the West Bank and, some years later, as a high school junior in Jordan, had to recover his mastery of the language. Then, as an undergraduate at The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, he traded that locale for Beirut to spend a semester in Lebanon. "These travels shaped the direction of my future," he says. "Being an outsider who was befriended in all these countries made me value difference rather than fear or reject it."

John subsequently decided that he wanted to use what he experienced growing up to facilitate interfaith dialogue in the Middle East, with the goal of working toward a peace initiative in that part of the world. He realized that to pursue this aim he needed a master's degree. But he also needed to earn a living and didn't want to incur "scads" of debt along the way.

He discovered Georgetown's Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program and its Islam and Muslim-Christian Relations concentration. The program as a whole appealed to John for many reasons. Perhaps first was the in-depth curriculum it offered, in a way that would let him obtain an education related directly to his employment in international trade while allowing him to continue working full-time.

As John says, "I appreciate that I can maintain my full-time job, but my decision to attend graduate school part-time was not just a financial calculation. There's an intangible benefit in combining the real world with the academic one. I work for an international trade group and confront related issues on a daily basis. Then I go to school, where I learn about those issues and their bigger implications."

John intends to return to the Middle East and he believes that when he does, he'll be ready to pursue his ambition to bring people of different faiths together for common good.