interview!!

had the interview today!!  it went really well.  the recruiter said he is going to recommend me (to the regional office in chicago) and that i should expect a follow-up interview in a couple of weeks.  then pending that outcome, which doesn't seem to be a big deal, i will hopefully get a nomination!

he basically asked all of the interview questions i posted, pretty much in order.  (have i praised the availability of the internet in the last 15 minutes?)  it was really no problem at all.  i'd already thought through all of them and was completely relaxed besides.  something about being in business and being on the spot in front of managers on a semi-regular basis – and having 20+ years of experience doing it – makes it pretty easy.  and "thinking on your feet" is a cakewalk when you know all the questions ahead of time.  even if he had thrown some curves in there, i would have been fine since i was so comfortable having a solid idea of what the interview would be like ahead of time.

i learned some interesting things.  i already knew that engineering is a "specialty" area, meaning they are happy to get people with those skills, but it's not one of the six main program areas.  what i figured out is that you still get placed within one of the general program areas anyway (subject for another time), and you do something within that area that has some engineering aspect to it.  so for example, i could end up working on water resource projects within the health program area.  more than that, i could end up anywhere from a site that specifically has an engineering project and has actually requested an engineer to a place where there is no particular engineering need at all.  furthermore, i learned that the level of definition for your work can vary enormously.  i could come into a situation where the job description is set and very well defined, or one where there is only a general principle or direction and no established project in place.  in other words, i could land in east osh-kosh being told to work on "agriculture" with no discernible engineering slant and no set goals or tasks defined.  wow.

volunteers also tend to have secondary projects they work on.  things they get interested in or want to accomplish or stumble upon or fit their personalities that they take on in addition to their main project.  things to do while waiting for things on the main project to develop or while things are on hold (like during the summer of a school year) and so on.  my interviewer had several other things he worked on, including having a radio show and doing health education with municipal first-responders and setting up a computer network for some community members.  now you're talking!  all this and i get to make stuff up too!!

i asked about the likelihood of being assigned to latin america.  i had read somewhere that it may not be easy to get placed there since so many people have had spanish training and would all like to go there.  the recruiter let me know that my four years of high school and one semester of college spanish would be a minimum to have me qualified as having spanish language knowledge, though he ominously went on to ask a couple of times about my flexibility in being assigned to other areas of the world.  he himself had been in paraguay and noted that his moderate amount of school spanish was not much help to him since the training he received was for guarani, the local native language, and not spanish.  in the end, he ended up having to learn both, and advised me to start brushing up on my spanish in advance.

there's no way to know, of course, in what kind of setting a volunteer will land.  we talked about this a bit.  he was in a "medium city" – about 14,000 people with 3 paved blocks, then cobblestone, then dirt roads.  he said of the 108 volunteers in paraguay, only 1 didn't have electricity, about 25% didn't have running water, and about 50% didn't have hot water.  but in his city there were 2 internet cafes.  so, as expected, it's a mixed bag and impossible to know ahead of time.  but he did point out that paraguay and bolivia (where the PC no longer operates) are two of the poorest countries in latin america.  that said, africa, china, any other place is a whole different ball of wax and also completely unknown for what the conditions could be.

ha!  and get this!  even once you have received your invitation, the very last step, and you know where you're going and when your plane takes off, you STILL don't know *where* you're going.  turns out you only know for sure what country you are going to.  you get three months of training before you find out in what village/town/city you'll be living.  so you pack for 2-plus years without even knowing whether you'll be in the middle of nowhere or in a city?  yep, says he.  but you know a lot from knowing what country you'll be going to, he says.  if you're going to paraguay i guess you can make some good guesses (there's only really one or two real cities?).  if you're headed to china, you can be sure you'll be in a relatively crowded place with lots of people.  that's all well and fine, i think, but what about if you are told you're going somewhere like peru?  i don't even have to explain to him what i mean (village vs town vs city, coast vs plains vs mountains), he just nods and says "you could end up anywhere."  big help there.

so now i wait again to here from the guy in chicago.  hopefully he doesn't take too long this time.  i'm imagining it will be a short phone interview to elaborate on any of the topics we discussed that he'd like to know more about.  then i guess it goes to washington for them to assign a general geographic area and program area.  oh, and approximate timing, too!  whee!

so this is what my online status looks like today, before the update to indicate the interview has been completed: