Carl Stecker, Senior Technical Advisor, Catholic Relief Services

By Evelyn Garland, Student Outreach Coordinator

Christian Connections for International Health (CCIH)

Profile

Dr. Carl Stecker has nearly 30 years of international health experience in Africa, and over 20 years of experience in international HIV and AIDS. With a BA in Nursing, a Masters in Public Health and Tropical Medicine and an EdD in Nonformal Adult Education, Stecker has been with Catholic Relief Services, Baltimore, MD, since 2002. He is a Senior Technical Advisor for HIV and AIDS helping to provide technical assistance to the agency’s 280+ HIV projects in 62 countries. In addition to promoting and helping to assure the technical excellence of these projects, the bulk of his time is spent on policy, advocacy, and resource development for faith-based organizations working in HIV and AIDS. He is also the agency’s chief spokesperson on HIV-related issues. From February 2004 through June 2006, Dr. Stecker was the initial Senior Program Director for AIDSRelief, the CRS-led consortium for the “Rapid Expansion of Antiretroviral Therapy,” a 5-year PEPFAR-supported project to deliver ART to 137,600 clients in nine PEPFAR countries through 200 local partners. As of the 31 December 2008, more than 368,000 HIV-positive individuals were enrolled in supportive care services with over 138,000 on ARVs.

Getting Started

Evelyn: I’ve read your brief bio from the CCIH Conference booklet. It talks more about your recent experience. Could you talk a little bit about how you got started right after college or graduate school?

Carl: (thinking) I started thinking about working in international health and to be overseas even before I graduated from college. After my sophomore year in college, I took a year off. I had been majoring in pre-med, pre-physical therapy, something that was going to be healthcare related. I just wasn’t sure what direction I wanted to go with it so I took a year off and traveled with a gospel singing group for fifteen months. We’ve decided as a group that each of us could spend a week apart from the group, and spend it with field service. So I spent my week in Cameroon with a Norwegian doctor and a nurse that ran a 50 bed hospital in a rural part of Cameroon. That was a critical experience for me as I then thought about what to do next. I left that experience with: I want to work in French-speaking West Africa, in healthcare.

Then I went back to school finished my degree as a registered nurse. My first job was working at a hospital in the U.S. – for six months, another six months back at the university where I graduated from in a sophomore nursing class as a clinical instructor, and then I went to Africa again with a second gospel singing group for 15 months in 1980-81. Upon completion of that tour, I went back to Africa with Evangelical Lutheran Church in America – it was 1982 when I went over.

Evelyn: How did you fund your gospel singing group trip?

Carl: That was by freewill offering. We had made about a hundred concerts before leaving the U.S. over a five-month period of time. Then we spent nine months in Africa. Then we came back and traveled for another three months going back to many of those same congregations. It was a break-even kind of engagement – when the trip was over, the funds were finished – it was not an ongoing thing. It was sort of a time when none of us were thinking of that as a professional career but all of us had either finished university or still had, like myself, a couple of years left.

Evelyn: You started working in a hospital – was that international health related? Or, was it domestic healthcare?

Carl: Well, because I knew that I wanted to go and work overseas, and at the time when I graduated there was no immediate position open within the Lutheran Church, which was where I wanted to serve. So I said: I’ll work. My first job out of college then was, rather than taking a specific position, I said I wanted to be a float nurse. As a float nurse, I could go anywhere in all of the services in the hospital and get a wide variety of experience. So when a position opened up and I could go work overseas, I already had a wider experience, even from a U.S. nursing perspective.

Evelyn: Why do you think that you, not somebody else, got the position with the Lutheran Church?

Carl: It’s another long story. I’ll try to make it short. After the first six month that I was in this hospital in the U.S., I was asked by the organization that I’d traveled with three years previously if I would lead a group to the same countries – it would be a gospel singing group, again, for 15 months. So I said yes. It was during that trip that I took my week apart from the rest of group and I spent it in Cameroon at another hospital that the Lutheran Church operated there. At that hospital was a young woman who was also a graduate from where I went to college. She went immediately from graduation to working in Cameroon. That’s why there was a position open when I graduated – because she took the open position. While we were there during that week, I asked her to marry me. She said yes. I came back and worked for another 6 months in the U.S. again in another hospital and again as a float before I went back over to Cameroon to be her spouse. That’s how I ended up getting in – still there wasn’t a position open. My wife was salaried and I was a volunteer spouse for the first three years that we served together in Cameroon.

Evelyn: Wow, three years!

Carl: Yeah. At the end of that three years they decided that we could split our call – each got half of our salary, but we were recognized as being full-time called missionaries so we could each receive salary. We continued to serve in Cameroon and Central African Republic until the end of 1997.

Evelyn: So you got your foot in the door by volunteering for years?
Carl: Right, exactly. I married into the position and I volunteered my time at the hospital as many other spouses would do. And, of course, I worked 150% of the time. (Laugh…)

Transition

Evelyn: Before you joined the Catholic Relief Services (CRS), had you always been working for the Lutheran Church?

Carl: Uh-huh. Pretty much. We came back in December of 1997 for our children’s high school and beyond education. It was very difficult re-integrating back into the U.S. for each of us individually and as a family. I held out for a public health job and after a year I was still unemployed. It was really hard. So I did consulting for about 2 years before entering into CRS.

Evelyn: When you first started working for CRS, did you have a smooth transition coming from a Lutheran background to a Catholic environment?

Carl: I didn’t find that very difficult, actually. Lutheran Church, Catholic Church, Episcopal Church, Presbyterian Church… there are a lot of similarities. That felt very natural. I wasn’t asked to become Catholic. Catholic Relief Services doesn’t hire based on whether you’re a Catholic or not. I knew before the interview and the interview confirmed that I as an employee of CRS as the official arm of the Catholic community in the U.S. for international aid and development I would have to be able to express and support the teachings of the Catholic Church around those sensitive issues. As long as I’m willing to express and support those values on behalf of Catholic Relief Services and able to do that in a public venues, it’s not a problem for me to be a Lutheran working in a Catholic agency.

Combating misperception and misinformation

Evelyn: Do you find that many people have misperceptions about what Catholics believe and do? If you do, what do you think students and recent graduates can do to bridge this gap and combat the misinformation?

Carl: I do believe that there are misperceptions about what the Catholic Church does or says around HIV prevention, family planning, and reproductive health services. I think the best thing that a student or a young professional could do is to go into it open-minded and realize that if they are reading this from a news article, that it has to be taken with grain of salt, and they should try and seek to talk to somebody in an organization that is in this place. For example, contact someone from Catholic Relief Services and say “I read it in an article and I’d like to know more about it.” Develop a personal relationship or at least have a personal encounter to find out the truth and allow there be a fair period of time for a fair explanation.

Networking for employment

Evelyn: As you know, CCIH is a networking organization. When a student is networking, how do you think he, without much experience, can impress a professional? Or, what kind of students would you like to network with?

Carl: I’m assuming you mean networking to look for employment, or for an internship, or for an opportunity to volunteer, or to be involved with an organization. It’s all about relationships and connections. Be assertive and introduce yourself to people, say I’m really interested in so and so. Seek out the kind of people you’re going to work for and with. Have conversations with them. It really is all about relationships.

I don’t know how many people I’ve heard from have said, “I put my resume into a number of organizations, either I don’t hear back or I don’t get a positive response or I don’t get to the interview.” My question to them becomes: What homework have you done about the organization? Yes, they have an open position, why do you want to work for them? Whom in the organization do you know? Do you know anybody? Did you go through their website? Did you look at all their web pages? Did you read some of their reports? Did you try to contact those people? Be creative! For example, Joe Smith, a physician, wrote a report about his experience and operational research he did in Mozambique, and Dr. Joe Smith works for World Vision International. If you know anybody else’s address in World Vision, contact them and ask if you could be in contact with Joe Smith about his work in Mozambique. Most of the time, the organization will send you their contact information. If you’re not getting a response then just guess – all the World Vision International emails are whatever their name is @wvi.org, so then try ten different combinations of jsmith, joesmith, j.smith, joe.smith, smith.j, … @wvi.org. You’re going to get one that doesn’t bounce back and you know that person has probably got your email. So, that’s another creative way. But why not?

Evelyn: Could you give a specific example of creative networking?

Carl: I’ll give you my story for coming to CRS. The position that I’m in, Senior Technical Advisor, is a pretty high level position within the agency. When I heard that this particular position was open, I applied. You’d expect to hear back fairly shortly if they are really looking for somebody. I waited for about 5 days, and then I followed up with an email to the recruiter and said: I’ve applied, I haven’t got any response and I’m very interested in this position, and reiterated in two sentences my qualifications – just a short note – looking to hearing from you, and asked who else I could speak to about responsibilities in this position. They actually wrote back and gave me the name of someone that currently held the position that was going to be moving. I contacted that person. We talked about the position. So then my name got to into “the system”, in a sense. I know from being now in the agency that when I get a call like that and if I know that we are looking for a position and someone gets that far, I’ll go down to HR and say: “Did you get an application from so and so? Why haven’t we seen it yet?” Because there is always an initial screening. Maybe the person making the application has nine of the ten desirable attributes that we are looking for but not all ten, so initially HR screened him/her out.

After talking with the person who currently held the position who was going to be leaving, I got a telephone interview. At the end of the interview, I said: “So what’s the next step? When can I expect to hear from you again?” They said: “Well, we want to move on this fairly quickly so you’ll probably hear back from us within a week.” I now know that it doesn’t usually happen that quickly at CRS. So… (pause & laugh…) I followed up a week later since I hadn’t heard anything. They said: “Well, it’s taking longer than we think.” And now, of course I was not Catholic, I thought it was because I was not Catholic; I thought I did a good phone interview. So I called up the person that I had originally spoken to and I said: “Well, it’s been a week. What’s the process that will happen from here? I was told that it has been taking a little bit longer than it was initially expected. Who’s involved in these kinds of decisions?” They mentioned somebody’s name, so I did exactly what I just told you – I figured out about five different permutations of their name@crs.org. And I sent an email and I said something about the telephone interview and that “I’m looking forward to hearing from you about the next step.” So I got another telephone interview follow-up with that person. Then they called me in for a face-to-face interview.

So part of it is just being really persistent, be assertive, but not in your face, assertive. That really opened the door. You’ve got to get your resume seen to get a phone interview and you hope if they don’t hire you over the phone, you’ll get a face-to-face interview. At every step, know what their delay is, know what the process is, and then if they say it’s going to be a week, don’t wait two weeks – follow up in a week, and say: “Hope that I’ll hear from you at the end of the week” – “we talked last week, just wondering how else I could be helpful to provide more information in your process?”

Evelyn: A lot of students feel intimidated being overly persistent in reaching out to potential employers, as they figure: Well, professionals are probably busy with a thousand other things… Do you think there are a lot of professionals who don’t mind students contacting them persistently?

Carl: I think that a lot of professionals hope that HR is going to filter them out and they’ll actually see and hear from candidates that have potential to meet the need of the agency for that particular job being recruited for. And they don’t always appreciate being contacted separately. But it does show a lot of initiative and sometimes it’s that! We often write qualifications in such a way that they are not absolutes. It’ll say “3-5 years of field experience preferred” – “preferred”. It doesn’t mean you have to have it. So if you’ve got 2 years as a Peace Corps volunteer and you’ve made five 2-week long mission trips with your denomination to work in healthcare in Haiti or some place, you don’t have 3 years of experience – even though that was our “preference” – but you’ve got some other overseas experience and you’ve got some valid experience, even if you didn’t live there for “3-5 years”. So try to look for those keywords like “preferred”. If it says “master’s required”, usually master’s is required. If it says “master’s preferred”, you could have a BA or BS or something else.

And even that, I’ll say, is not absolute. If the job has been posted for 6 weeks and we don’t have a candidate yet that fills that, we may downgrade the job description, either in the responsibilities or in the qualifications that we are looking for. So it might have said “master’s required; 3-5 years of experience preferred”, and in the next iteration it may come out as “master’s preferred”. So keep an eye on the ones that might have been out there for a while that we haven’t found somebody for, because they may be considering reducing the requirements for them or they may downgrade the positions a little bit to provide more of an entry-level – they’d figure that they are going to get someone who has some of the qualities and they can grow the experience internally.

Entry-level positions at CRS

Evelyn: When you interview students for positions that don’t require a lot of experience, what do you look for in the students you interview?

Carl: It’s hard because there aren’t any positions that we don’t require a lot experience. In my particular department – Program Quality Support, we’re looking for people with technical background. We have program specialist, TA (Technical Advisor)-I, TA-II, Senior Technical Advisor, and Principal Technical Advisor –five levels of technical positions. Entry level is really Program Specialist and for that we have “master’s preferred”; for a TA, we’re looking for “master’s required” and 3-5 years of experience. Much of the time, we’re looking for the TA-I; that’s what we would start out with a Program Manager at a field position out in the field – so even then we’re looking for someone who’s already been in the field preferably for 3-5 years.

Evelyn: How about internships and field fellowships?

Carl: We have an International Development Fellows Program. We’re looking for qualified candidates both for a management track as well as a technical track. There are usually 20-30 accepted in a year, against an application pool of about 300. And, master’s required – they’re (the candidates) out looking for field experience and we know that they are coming in as interns. But, that being said, that year-long position often rolls over into Program Specialist or Technical Advisor. A career-change person who has done something else overseas for 3-5 years but switched into health field could get hired at a higher level technical assistance. So often that’s another route to go as to look out for those internships, even that though for us is a competitive process.

Another tactic. The positions that we put in our headquarter HR pool are international positions. If someone’s got a lot of gumption and he just want to go and hang out in Tanzania, he might be able to get a position as a “local hire”, for instance in this case in CRS at the Tanzania CRS office. It’s not an “international position”. It’s not being offered through our headquarters HR system. But it’s something that is being offered locally. The difference would be: an entry level position here (in HQ) for a Program Specialist might be $30,000-35,000 a year and whatever it takes us to support you if you are going to be overseas; that same “local hire” might only be $10,000-15,000, because of the difference in pay scales between a local professional in-country and an international professional hired and brought in for the position. I’ve seen several people go that route, and they say: I just know that God wants me to be in Tanzania and I’m going to hang out in Tanzania; if I only make $12,000 a year, God’s going to help provide for me and that’s going to be my entry.

Real job, real life

Evelyn: Do you find it difficult to separate work and life since your work requires you to keep up with the news?

Carl: It is. It’s challenging to really take a vacation, to take a 3-day weekend. It depends on your position. But when you’re in a fairly senior position, you need to check out your email every day even when you’re on vacation. It doesn’t mean you have to answer the email, except for the ones that come from your boss – he knows you’re on vacation, he only writes to you because he needs you to say something right then. The hard part is that I know I get 200 other emails today and when I go back to work a week from now I’m going to have about 2,000 emails. Oh, wow! Some of those emails have to be re-written by people who really want an answer because I’m not going to be able to look at 2,000 emails when I come back to work on Monday next week. And then, … you just learn how to do it. It’s very hard. It would be hard to be in the position and have young kids. I’ve got adult children except for one that’s still at home that’s in senior high school. The seven years I’ve been with CRS takes a toll on the family. Sometimes the job takes precedence over family, which it shouldn’t have to. Our agency is very family-friendly and would say: “Your family comes first.” It’s still hard.

Evelyn: What do you like the best about your job?

Carl: I really like my job for the variety. It has the right mix for me: issues that are very technical in content, within HIV, I need to keep myself abreast of new and innovative things coming up, so I like that piece of what I do; the advocacy piece, it’s all about people, it’s about who you know and being able to have contact with important people when other people may not have that same level of availability or ability to connect, so that our issues get heard, putting them in a way that is very concise so that we maintain the relationship and the availability, so there’s people skills involved. It involves, right now, the right amount of traveling, which is about 30% of the time that I’m gone and usually fairly well spaced out, a week to two weeks at a time every six to eight weeks or so. I haven’t traveled for eight weeks and I certainly feel the itch right now – to go somewhere.

And the people that I work with are great. We have a very collegial environment, respectful of each other’s expertise and very affirming of each other. Other than my very first job in the hospital, I’ve only ever worked in faith-based organizations; people for the most part are very affirmative of each other. I love that kind of environment.

Evelyn: What do you like the least?

Carl: (Pause) There’s so much good work that can be done, and there are constraints, most often financial. It’s hard to make decisions on work to prioritize your time. Having to decide what’s priority when everything around HIV should be a priority it seems like we could do more if we had more money but we don’t have enough money to do that.


Part of the financial constraints impacts the number of people that you can have as employees to help provide that technical assistance to the fields, and when you don’t have enough people you can’t provide the services that need to be provided – that’s hard. Getting invited to a workshop and saying: “No, we can’t do that. We don’t have enough funds. Can we do this through teleconference?” – It is not always the best but it’s another way – you have to look for alternatives.

More about Carl: I loaned him my USB disk; he returned it with job-hunting tips

The first time I met Carl was three years ago at CCIH Annual Conference. It was completely random. I overheard Carl asking somebody else whether he could borrow a USB disk for a few minutes. That person did not have one. So I offered to loan mine to Carl. Soon after, he found me in a workshop, sat next to me, and we started to chat. He said he worked for CRS – quite a big name for me, who was a nervous novice in international health looking for a job. After learning that, Carl encouragingly shared with me some very useful job-hunting tips. “Wow, isn’t that nice?” I thought to myself. Later, I got to know Carl better through word of mouth. Many people I know are impressed with Carl’s warm and honest personality and value him as a trusted friend.

So, Carl’s name naturally came into my mind when I was planning for the “In Touch” interview series. Not surprisingly, he was very supportive of the interview series and immediately agreed to be interviewed. Here, he shares with all students and recent graduates even more job-hunting tips than he told me about the first time – hope you, too, will find the information helpful.