Morgan Roach Viña 2007

When Morgan Roach Viña graduated from Sweet Briar in 2007, she knew she wanted a career in Washington, D.C., but wasn’t sure what that would look like. Since then, her career has taken her to Capitol Hill, the United Nations, the Pentagon, a think tank, and now a prestigious lobbying firm.

The common denominator in all these posts: having the confidence and a willingness to make tough decisions. “Working for the U.S. government, I heard a lot of reasons why we shouldn’t change the status quo. To this, I say, ‘Don’t tell me why something can’t be done; tell me how you’re going to accomplish it.’”

A government major, Morgan used internships to try out a number of government roles with the Virginia legislature, Congress, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But when she took former history professor John Ashbrook’s class on modern European history, she realized foreign policy was her niche.

Morgan initially planned to go to law school, but after she “bombed the LSAT,” she changed course. “I ended up getting my master’s degree at the London School of Economics in one year, half the time and cost it would have taken me to attend graduate school in the United States,” she recalls.

Early in her career, when she was working as a research assistant for the Heritage Foundation, Boko Haram attacked the U.N. Headquarters in Abuja. She realized the attack could have broader policy implications. When she told her boss, he casually suggested she write on it. “More to prove a point than anything,” she recalls, “I wrote a blog post and then a longer policy piece. This blog post turned into a bigger campaign to get the administration to designate Boko Haram as a foreign terrorist organization, which they eventually did.”

Organizing a working group on Sub-Saharan Africa led to working for U.S. Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tennessee), who was then the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

When Nikki Haley was nominated to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Morgan briefed her on the committee’s priorities and vet her fitness for office. “I liked her so much that after she was confirmed, I asked her for a job,” Morgan says. She eventually became Haley’s chief of staff.

After Haley left the United Nations, Morgan moved to the Pentagon, where she served as chief of staff for international security affairs in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. From there, she went into the private sector, working as a management consultant, launching a government affairs office for a national security think tank, and now as a principal in Invariant’s national security practice.

Throughout her career, Morgan still makes time to mentor Sweet Briar students and recent graduates as part of the College’s Alumnae Mentorship Program. “Working in politics and government can be like navigating a minefield,” she says. “There are so many unwritten rules and protocols one is expected to follow. I had to learn a lot of these lessons the hard way.”