Adriana Diaz, 2024 US Alumni Award Laureate

On Friday, November 22, 2024, Ambassador of France Laurent Bili welcomed the Sciences Po American Foundation and our guests to the Résidence de France in Washington D.C. On this occasion, we honored Adriana Diaz (‘09) with the 2024 US Sciences Po Alumni Award, whose career has echoed Sciences Po’s commitment to excellence, active learning, and open-mindedness. 

Diaz was interviewed by Mike Schmuhl, Chairman of the Indiana Democratic Party and fellow Alumni Award honoree in 2021. During their discussion, Diaz and Schmuhl spoke of their ties to Sciences Po, the impact of international education, and the importance of challenging our perspectives.

Diaz is currently co-host of "CBS Mornings Plus," a third hour of "CBS Mornings" broadcast weekdays by several CBS-owned stations and simulcast on CBS News 24/7.

After her undergraduate studies at Princeton, and starting off her career in finance in New York, Diaz knew it was time for a career change. She followed a whim (and took up the offer of an available room from an old study abroad friend) to cross the Atlantic and start her graduate studies at Sciences Po through the Dual MPA program with Columbia. Studying at Sciences Po now for the second time allowed her to open her mind to, as she states, “the infinite ways that we can all approach the same thing”. 

During both her undergraduate exchange and graduate degree studies at Sciences Po, Diaz recalled having her eyes opened to alternative points of view. First when one of her Colombian classmates expressed their frustration that students from the U.S. call themselves American students, with no regard to any of the other countries in the American continents. And again when writing a paper on immigration from Northern Africa to France, when she discovered the French government’s intention in omitting race from data collection- a concept that seemed so foreign to her as someone who “grew up always circling Black and Non-White Hispanic on Scantron forms.”

In closing, Schmuhl asked Diaz ‘what would you tell [prospective students] about Sciences Po and your experience? She recalled that her numerous academic experiences internationally have afforded her great opportunities in her career. As a junior reporter, she was sent to cover the 2010 Haiti earthquake thanks to her skills speaking French, the migrant caravan in Central America thanks to her Spanish skills, and her job as an Asia correspondent for CBS News thanks to her time studying Mandarin. In this ever-changing social and political environment, she reminds us, “we all need to challenge ourselves to understand other perspectives in this country”.