Monday, June 15, 2009

The Test

Today marked the first step on the road to a completely new and completely different career path. I sat for the Foreign Service exam. Working for the U.S. State Department overseas would be the kind of life-altering, relevant and altruistic pursuit that my work has, heretofore, been missing. I never, in my wildest dreams, thought that I would be locked in work for the sake of work or that I would pursue a career that had as its only goal, its only end, the accumulation of wealth.

I shouldn't complain. At this point, I would sit in a windowless cubicle for eighteen hours a day to put food on the table and provided for my family. But I know there are greener pastures. The most wonderful thing about pursuing the Foreign Service is we have no idea where those pastures lie. Stockholm. Santiago or Suriname.

It is an incredibly competitive process. I read somewhere that of the 18,000 who sit for the exam annually, only 300 or so are eventually hired. If I am offered a post, it, most likely, wouldn't be for a year. That's a lot of deals that will go south or a lot of tables I have to wait in the interim.

But the test went about as I expected. There are 4 sections: job knowledge, grammar, personality and essay writing. The job knowledge was the first section and it was a combination of U.S. government, history, geography, math, management techniques, computer literacy and pop culture. In my practice tests I was scoring about 75%. ugh. But since this morning, I have checked my answers on the questions I remember being iffy on and finding myself pleasantly surprised that I got them right, i.e. the Camp David Accords of 1978 (I ordered a book of modern Middle Eastern history on eBay but I hadn't read it yet) and just two night ago I was flipping through the world atlas Elise got me for our 2nd wedding anniversary and for some reason was studying the geography of South America and I got a question on that exact region! Having gone to business school, you would think I would be comfortable with the business negotiation and management questions, but they seemed incredibly arbitrary to me. And I don't know why I read Joseph Heller's Catch-22, but I'm sure glad I did.

The next section was the personality test. You just answer basic questions about yourself, i.e. "Do people look to you as a leader in emergency or stressful situations?", "How many immediate friends do you have whose primary language is something other than English?" and "At a party, how often do you strike up conversation with complete strangers?" I felt completely inadequate. Mostly, because I have very few close friends and the only place fun and exciting I go is with Sam & Elise to the park.

The 3rd section was grammar. This was the only section I didn't go to the wire on. In fact, I had like 15 minutes left. Not to brag, but when I took the GRE I scored in the 98% on grammar so I wasn't too worried.

The essay...okay, I admit it...I went in completely cold on the essay. Yes, I should have written some practice essays, but, seriously, who has time to write practice essays? Not Sam, that's for sure. It took me at least 5, probably closer to 10, minutes to process the essay topic. Literally, I have 30 minutes and I spent close to 10 of them staring blankly at the screen. But when I did start writing, I was happy with what came out. I threw in some current events (Kin Jong Il and his Taepodong-2 missile) some 50 cent words (amalgamation and unequivocal) and hopefully my grammar was spot on. My heart raced. I distinctly remember looking at the stopwatch and it telling me I had 45 seconds left and knew I had to write the last sentence of my conclusion paragraph.

Maybe I said too much about the test, but I'm excited. Ask Elise. It's the about the only thing I've been excited about recently except EHP, #2 and the new season of "So You Think You Can Dance"!

Now I have to wait 4 to 6 weeks for my results....................................

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