Application

For those interested in my experience with the application process, this page gives a time-line of events.

My interest in the Peace Corps started in High School as an idea of how to spend some time after graduation from college and has evolved over the past 6 years. I now see the Peace Corps as an essential interim step between my University training and my future ability to perform effectively within any given position.

March 28, 2010: I submitted my online application to the Peace Corps.  This preliminary application is lengthy and took me about three weeks to complete.  The application asks extensively about community service, volunteer work, and practical skills that you have developed over the past few years in order to place you in an appropriate sector. I also had to write two essays: one that explained my motivation for becoming a volunteer and one describing my past cross-cultural experiences.

April 23, 2010: Local interview with Sylvia Graham. The interview process is intense and lasted almost 2 hours. They ask tons of questions to try and judge your level of flexibility and comfort in working in unknown conditions. So much of the process is ambiguous, it makes it really difficult to answer questions in an interview when you could be living in an apartment or a hut, could have running water or a composting toilet.

May 1, 2010: Submitted supplementary vegetarian questionnaire.  Since I have been a veg for a while, the Peace Corps makes you submit an additional form explaining your reasons for being a vegetarian, to explain what kind of vegetarian you are, and to see how you would react to “typical” scenarios that might arise in country. For the record: I have no intentions of remaining a vegetarian while in service. It has been a great choice for me in the past, but I completely recognize how difficult this would be to maintain and explain while in Fiji. Here’s to 27 months of mutton and canned fish!

May 20, 2010: Regional interview with Anne Fraser. This was a follow up interview where I was asked to explain certain responses from the first interview and to go more in depth about my ability to react and reside within a new cultural construct.

June 1, 2010: I received my notification from the Seattle Regional Office that I had been Nominated! In the nomination stage you receive a general region and projected sector that you may be working in. At this point everything is so tentative, you can really still be placed anywhere! My nomination was for the South Pacific in Environmental Education, and luckily enough my invitation remained the same!

June 20, 2010: Submitted my barrage of medical documents. Since the Peace Corps will be my primary medical provider during my service, they ask for everything… literally everything. It took about a week to make all the appointments and get all the forms in for medical, dental, and vision services.

June to March: Interim period from hell. This is where i experiences what many people refer to as “Restless Applicant Syndrome”. This consisted of me checking the Peace Corps website and the Peace Corps Wiki site multiple times a day, hoping someone contacted me requesting more information or to magically tell me where I was going! This was brutal, stressful, depressing, and exciting. I was contacted once in December when the office in DC requested an updated resume and transcript. Other than that, it was just me and the endless anxiety…

March 6, 2011: I got a call from the Peace Corps office in Washington DC… no way, could it really be? After nearly 10 months of nothing? And of course… who missed the call? Me. I eventually got a hold of them and it was another mini-interview, but thankfully this time a bit more targeted. They asked me things like if I was comfortable around water, what kind of practical environmental experiences I have, etc. The interview ended with Heather from DC telling me that I had been invited to serve in the Peace Corps and that my official assignment would be coming in the mail.

March 9, 2011: I received my official Invitation! A huge blue envelope came today and it’s now 100% official, I will be going to Fiji on May 17 as an Environmental Resource Management volunteer. The invitation had tons of paperwork regarding insurance, loans, information, passport forms, welcome books, correspondence and press release forms along with a myriad of other papers. Now its time to get down to it and start putting things aside to take with me and fill out all the appropriate paperwork!

 

** April 7, 2011: Received staging documents and flight information! Now the only other dates to report are…

May 16-17, 2011: Staging event in Los Angeles, CA.

May 17: Flight from LAX to Nadi, Fiji to begin PST!