When Roberta Jacobson travels to Cuba or Miami, many people approach her to show their gratitude for the U.S.’s new plan to re-establish domestic relations with Cuba.

Jacobson, a parent of senior Gil Jacobson, has been the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere affairs since 2012. She has also worked in the U.N. as the principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs and Director of the Office of Mexican Affairs and has had other positions in international affairs.

“When I was in college, I realized that I loved political science, so I became a political science major, and I knew I wanted [a career in] international affairs,” Jacobson said. “I think part of that was growing up in the Watergate age and realizing how important it was to have good, clean government.”

Jacobson is the highest ranking person in the U.S. Department of State who works solely on Western Hemisphere affairs. She runs the Bureau of Western Hemisphere affairs and has 10,800 people working for her.

“We have relationships with all of the countries of the hemisphere except for Cuba, and we’re moving towards having full diplomatic relations with Cuba too,” Jacobson said. “My job is to supervise and manage as much as I can in those relationships and report those to my boss, the undersecretary for political affairs and the Secretary of State.”

In Jacobson’s career she has had many proud moments, but her biggest accomplishment may still be in the near future.

“If we actually get to a point where we open embassies in Cuba, and Cuba opens an embassy here, that’s probably going to be the biggest one,” Jacobson said.

Currently, Jacobson’s serves as a negotiator when it comes to the relations with Cuba. Another aspect of her role is implementing the president’s policy to try to reach full diplomatic relations.

“I think my role is to be tough in those negotiations and stand up for American principles of human rights and universal principles,” Jacobson said.

According to Jacobson, some people may be misinformed about the diplomatic relations with Cuba.

“A lot of people criticize that we’re moving towards those diplomatic relations, but it doesn’t mean we approve of the things that Cuba may do,” Jacobson said. “It just means that we think it’s better to be talking to them about it than to be isolated from both Cuba and many of our neighbors who do have relations with them.”

Jacobson is the first women to ever be Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs.

“In 2012 when I was appointed to this job, I really didn’t think there were that many firsts still left,” Jacobson said. “I thought women had pretty much gone through most of those glass ceilings.”

Jacobson had worked for three female Secretaries of State by the time she was appointed to her current role—Madeline Albright, Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.

“Every day when I go into my conference room to meet with my officers, I see this whole wall full of pictures, and it is a wall full of men,” Jacobson said. “It kind of reminds me that I’m the first.”

Despite being the first female to take this job title, Jacobson has rarely experienced discrimination because of her gender.

“On a couple of occasions I’ve felt a little bit of machismo or gender discrimination, but very rarely in my career,” Jacobson said. “I’ve been pretty lucky, and I’ve had really great women mentors my whole career.”

Up to this point in her career, Jacobson is particularly proud of two achievements. The first is her role in the Merida initiative with Mexico, a program that helps Mexico combat drug cartels and criminality.

“I was really proud of that because it was something I started working on when I was a director in Mexican affairs and continued working on when I was deputy assistant secretary,” Jacobson said. “I kind of conceived it and worked on it with the Mexican government at all levels. I think it’s made a real difference in the way we work with Mexico on fighting drugs.”

The second thing she is particularly proud of is an initiative called “100,000 strong in the Americas,” which aims to increase the number of exchange students between the United States and Latin America and the Caribbean.

“We’ve raised $3 million in funds to create new partnerships between Latin American and Caribbean schools and U.S. universities and community college, and our numbers are growing in terms of student exchanges,” Jacobson said.

According to Jacobson, staying informed about politics and the government is important because of how interconnected the world is today.

“I think today more than even in the past, the world’s a smaller place,” Jacobson said. “Last summer, for example, there was a crisis of unaccompanied children coming from Central America because they were fleeing violence or fleeing the destruction of their communities and family structures or lack of opportunity and poverty. Some of those very same unaccompanied children came to Montgomery County and are in Montgomery County schools today. Things that happen around the world affect not just us as a country but us as a community right down to the county level, and I think that we all need to know more about what’s going on in our world so that we can be better citizens of our state and county.”

For Jacobson, understanding other perspectives is the first step to bettering our world.

“I think that in the end whether it’s economic needs or political needs, we have to understand other countries’ perspectives because working together is the only way to tackle them,” Jacobson said. “No country can end up just doing things alone anymore, and I think you have so many more tools to enable you to do that, and I hope you’ll take advantage of all of them