I don’t believe in dream teams anymore. And blame my grad program at the School of Foreign Service for it.

On the face of it, you’d think I shouldn’t be complaining. I’m in the nation’s most sought-after graduate international relations program, with classmates from 30 countries around the world. Each one of the students brings amazing experience and diversity of background, and every day, you keep discovering and learning.

You find out that the guy next to you in class used to fly F-16s, the guy behind him used to shark-dive in Polynesia, another escorted Armenian refugees through the Caucasus and yet another prosecuted at Saddam’s trial. Yes sir, now that’s a dream team.

But there’s a problem. The dream team never plays on the same court. And this is true of all of Georgetown’s grad programs. The Master of Science in Foreign Service, Security Studies Program, Arab Studies and other regional studies programs students represent the best graduate talent that there is. Yet there is no forum on campus for them to come together and discuss and debate on the most pressing issues of the day.

Of course, there are a number of regional interest forums in the Graduate School of Foreign Service. For instance, the Professionals in Russian, East European and Eurasian Affairs, or the Middle East North Africa forum and other similar interest groups bring together students interested in a geographic region. But these forums are hardly known outside the program that dominates them (SSP/ MSFS, etc.). Not to mention the other graduate students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences such as government and conflict management majors.

As a result, unlike the undergraduates who have more clubs than bricks in Red Square, the graduate students have barely a handful of forums for intellectual exchange, and none of them are truly inter-program forums.

Perhaps you say this is how graduate life is — students do not and are not supposed to have a life beyond internships, jobs and classes. But that’s not how it’s supposed to be. Learning from peers is a vital part of education. Sharing views with peers is crucial to building love towards the alma mater — the Georgetown spirit. And this is true for graduates as well as undergrads.

So where does the Graduate Student Organization stand on all this? GSO is, after all, composed of these very graduate students, but its attempts at inter-program fraternization are limited to a couple of happy hours every semester. That doesn’t help. So what is needed: a truly inter-program student forum to discuss and debate the most burning issues of the day. Perhaps given the reputation of the SFS, the forum could be an international relations club, where not regional but topical issues are debated. Terrorism, proliferation, immigration and issues that are currently in the news — these are issues that these graduates will be deciding on when they start their careers, and it is important for them to get as global a viewpoint as possible.

So the two key elements to the success of any such forum are inter-program membership and choice of topics of global importance for debate.

Where should the impetus come from? It should come from GSO, the Dean’s office, the faculty, the directors of programs and, most importantly, it should come from the graduate students themselves. This is the challenge. Are there any graduate students at Georgetown who can really create an inter-program forum that involves all of the students? Do they have the gumption and the spirit to create an institution that will contribute immensely to nurturing esprit de corps among Georgetown graduates? Because Georgetown is supposed to be more than a word in your résumé; it’s supposed to be an experience. Can we make this happen?

Raja Karthikeya Gundu is a first-year graduate student in the MSFS.