Peace Corps Interview

I have been remiss in posting as of late, but this event shall not go undocumented. My Peace Corps interview was supposed to be scheduled for Wednesday, but something went wrong with the scheduling, and I found out Tuesday evening that the last available slot for me to interview would be Friday morning at 8am.

Now, I am not at all a morning person. Sure, I get up early most days to get to school on time to teach my little cretins. But this last week I’ve been on vacation in Florida (I’ll post about that later) and haven’t slept much, and my brain is not on morning time.

So last night I set my alarm for 7am to give myself time to wake up and prepare and look presentable. I’m visiting friends at college for a couple of days, so the only place I could go with steady wifi and little interruption was a dorm common room. I put a sign on the door pleading with passersby not to come in.

The interview started at 8 with a little technical difficulty with the webcams, but it started out pretty smoothly. My interviewer asked me a lot of the questions you’d find if you were to google search “peace corps interview questions” – which I’ve been doing for two weeks now. Other than reading through lists of questions I haven’t really prepared at all. I didn’t even go through and formulate answers to any of them. I don’t know how I managed not to feel too nervous about this interview.

Well, scratch that, maybe I do know. I think it’s that I believe that if I’m honest and straightforward, then if the interview goes well there’s no stress, and if I find that the PC doesn’t like my answers, then we probably have a significant enough difference of ideals or opinion that I wouldn’t want to work with them anyway. That’s what I call a recipe for acceptance and peacefulness going into what could possibly be the most life changing interview of my life.

The interview lasted an hour. The guy was pretty formal and he said he couldn’t tell me how competitive I am or am not for the position. He did tell me that I’m one of around 300 applicants for 55 Rwandan positions. There’s also a 10 person waitlist per program. So I don’t really know how good my odds are in the grand scheme of things.

I’m happy with the answers I gave in the interview, and upon reflection there aren’t any I wish I’d answered differently. Honestly I’m so calm about all of it, it’s really quite perplexing. That’s not my usual M.O. But for now all I have to wait for is for my two references to submit the form/recommendation that the Peace Corps requested from them two days ago, and then my application can move forward. I’m pretty excited to see where this goes, but I’m also glad that I don’t feel like I’ll be devastated for long if it doesn’t work out. I think that’s a good place to be.