My full name is William Donald Shingleton and I was born to William and Virginia Shingleton on April 5, 1976 in Durham, North Carolina. We moved around a lot when I was a kid, and I lived in Memphis, Milwaukee (where my brother Nicholas was born and where I learned to love the Milwaukee Brewers), Brown Deer (WI), Lynchburg (VA), Muncie (IN), and Valparaiso (IN) before I finished middle school. We finally settled in Valparaiso, and I graduated from Valparaiso High School in 1994.
After high school, I decided that I really, really wanted to get out of semi-rural Indiana, so the closest college I applied to was in Washington, D.C. This is not to say that I don't like Valparaiso - it's a fantastic place to raise kids, but not terribly exciting when you're 18. I went to The American University in Washington, where I double-majored in Russian Studies and International Studies. I also was active in Model United Nations and Speech and Debate.
More importantly, while at American I met my wife, Sharon. We actually met my Freshman year on a trip to Model United Nations. She claimed that she never gets lost, and I always do, so I asked her to marry me. Two days after I met her. Of course, I meant it in jest at the time, but we dated for four and a half years before getting married on May 22, 1999.
Model UN and the speech and debate team were really my family in college - I wasn't terribly active on the floor or elsewhere in student government unless an IM Softball team was involved. I worked a string of internships including at the White House, D.C. Refugee Services Center, the White House, Congressman Pete Visclosky's office, the Department of the Treasury, the National Defense Council Foundation, and the Kennan Institute for Russian Studies.
I also got to go to Russia on a program at Moscow State University. Other than meeting my wife, Russia was my biggest experience in college. Other than a few trips to the English-speaking parts of Canada, I had never really been outside of the United States, so Russia was quite a shock. I stayed with a family that didn't speak any English, so my Russian improved dramatically while I was there. There was a group of about 12 students on the program together, and I nearly cried when, after the first two days with my host family speaking nothing but Russian, one of them said hello to me in English. Russia was a tremendous experience because of the perspective it gave me on both life there and on the United States. I know it's cliche, but you really can't appreciate what we've got in the United States until you go to someplace like Russia where the economy, society, and polity have been torn apart.
Of course, we saw all of the sights in Moscow and St. Petersburg - I actually saw Lenin on Thanksgiving Day 1996 (sort of - I'm pretty sure he's wax). Moscow, while very interesting from a political standpoint, is one of the ugliest cities on earth. It's easy to understand why Muscovites are alcoholics - the sky is always gray, the people dress in gray, the buildings are gray - it's like living in black and white.
Anyway, I got back from Russia and was in the middle of my senior year when I found out that I had been accepted to a master's degree program in Russian, East European and Central Asian studies at Harvard. Sharon and I moved up to Cambridge immediately following graduation, and I took a job with a congressional campaign. While the money on the campaign was good, the environment was awful, as everyone was demoralized or angry for one reason or another, the campaign manager couldn't instill any kind of discipline, and we eventually got pummeled at the polls. On top of this, Sharon was miserable our first few months here, mostly because she hated her job, too.
Luckily, the campaign ended, Sharon found a job that she really loved at Costume Works, and I found out how much I had been missing at American when I started classes at Harvard. The resources of the university, starting with the sheer power of the brand name, continue to astound me. I've had a string of classes that I really like, including a course in Human Rights and International Law my last semester that has me thinking about law school (and Sharon ready to kill me for it). I wrote my thesis on political transition in Uzbekistan, started to learn Uzbek, and was generally much happier and more challenged here than I ever was before.
Which is not to say that Harvard is perfect. My last semester there, I had a weekly course in the politics of the developing world that was horrific. I would come home every week and inform Sharon that "that was two hours of my life that I'm never going to get back." I also was in a class on economic reform where, during a conversation about the Gorbachev era, a Harvard undergraduate actually asked who perestroika was.
I spent summer 1999 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where I worked an internship at the U.S. Embassy. It was a real fiasco getting me there, since the State Department didn't get me the security clearance paperwork for two weeks and didn't give me the actual clearance until June. After actually getting there, the experience working at the embassy was invaluable. The ambassador, Joseph Presel may be the sharpest person that I ever met, even if he is overly stickly on grammar. The political arm of the embassy was short-staffed when I got there, so I really got a good taste of State Department work there. I got to visit dissidents who had just been abducted and beaten by the Interior Ministry, was a member of the U.S. delegation to peace talks on Afghanistan, and was generally thrilled with the fact that I was finally working an internship where I had real responsibility.
Of course, the down side to Tashkent was that I left right after the wedding. The wedding itself was a blast, although I was really running around with my hair on fire the week prior due to the fact that the wedding was May 22 and my last paper was due at noon on May 21. This was made even more stressful by the fact that my wife, whom I love dearly, wanted to have nothing to do with planning the actual event. As a result, her mother (in Arizona), the wedding coordinator at the church (my good friend Wendy Walker) and I did virtually all of the planning. I can't say that the wedding went off without a hitch - we did a wine ceremony, and the wine glass was filled too high, so I had to try and chug it (and failed, so one of the groomsmen had to pour the excess wine into the flowers); I had to break the friggin' glass twice, I forgot to bring a check for the minister (thankfully Aaron Kochar, my best man, had one) and other assorted small things went wrong. However, I can say that the ceremony probably reflected the people getting married and, hey, we were still married at the end of it. I had an awesome bachelor party that started (but did not end) at Fenway. We had a terrific reception - it was the first time I had seen all (or almost all) of my cousins in a really long time. Afterwards, we all went to see Star Wars - Episode I in our tuxes and dresses - Char did a toast with his tumbler of Dr. Pepper and I bet they're still talking about us at the movie theater in Acton.
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A picture from Pavlovsk, outside St. Petersburg, Russia. There were several empty pedastals due to toppling of Lenin statues in 1991. This photo was taken by either Jocelyn Pace or Wendy Stultz in 1996. I'm the one on the pedestal.
