I had my interview yesterday! I think it went really well. My recruiter is awesome and I'm kinda bummed that he's leaving in mid-August. Some of the questions were kind of hard to answer but most of them were really easy. It helps that I went over the
questions I listed in a previous post. The easy questions were ones like, "would you be willing to live in a country that has strange food, no alcohol, strict gender roles, etc." I felt a little silly answering each question with "yep, no problem there. Kinda excited about it," so I tried to come up with new things to say for each one. I talked about the importance of food in a country's culture. For instance, in America when someone talks about stuffing you think of Thanksgiving and Thanksgiving traditions and the history of Thanksgiving. There were questions about how I deal with stress and what I do about stress. That's a great opportunity to get out of your house/apt/etc and meet people in the community and make new friends. It's generally a good idea to turn everything into a positive and be as detailed as possible. For instance, instead of saying that your leadership position was "teaching kids at a YMCA," you should give a specific instance of something that happened there. Maybe tell a story about one specific instance; I told about making crafts with the kids and how they might come up with a really neat idea, but I've never done it before so we work together and try to figure it out as a team.
At the end of the interview we went over what types of jobs and locations I would like. I told him that I would prefer not to go to Africa (but also stressed that if PC wants me to go, I'll go - I'm not going to turn anything down). He said I'm most qualified for Community Development and Education. I chose Education/TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language). Early in the interview I asked about "secondary projects" (which is now called something else, but I forget what). He mentioned that in his experience the secondary projects can be more fulfilling and successful than the primary project (in my case TEFL). I decided that I'd like to do both, but have Community Development as a secondary project. I'd like to get involved with NGOs and I can do that as a secondary project - maybe in the summers when school's out.
So, my nomination (technically I'm "penciled in" because the September nominations aren't available until later this week or sometime next week, but he'll put me in when they open up) is for Eastern Europe - the Caucus region, TEFL, for late-September '09.
After I got home I ran to the computer and checked the
PCwiki timeline for which caucus countries leave in September. As Georgia and
Albania leave (in 2008) in the spring, I'm probably headed to
Azerbaijan!
So now I'll get the medical packet sometime in the next few weeks and I'll have to start filling out and scheduling appointments with my Drs, Dentist, and Eye Doc. Yay! I'll get tons of blood draw! *note the sarcasm*
Wish me luck!
