First actual contact with Placement

December 17, 2014; S/P Application Day 172: 

Sam received an email from a "Placement and Assessment Specialist" today notifying him of an opportunity to teach in Zambia, and wondering if he would like to be placed under consideration for this program. Since I wasn't mentioned in this email, Sam called the placement officer to see if he (we) are eligible for this opportunity. Unfortunately there are no openings in health or agriculture work sectors, so our application status remains unchanged.

Peace Corps Fake Out

November 5, 2014; S/P Application Day 130:

Today we received our first contact initiated by the PC since our nomination emails 100 days ago. The subject line was truncated in my email viewer, so all I saw was "You're Invited", I was so excited- but it turns out we were just being invited to a recruiting event in Massachusetts. So disappointing. Sam apparently had the same problem, only he was driving when he got the email. He had to pull off to the side of the highway. Not cool, Peace Corps, not cool.

Community Drop In Hours

September 29, 2014; S/P Application Day 93:

I checked in with our recruiter at Community Drop In Hours today. She says that everything is going as she expected so far. She confirmed that in her system, Sam and my applications are listed as "Ready to Invite", and also confirmed that we are, in fact, nominated to the Cambodia program. She also checked and told me that positions for the jobs we're applying for (TEFL and Community Health) have not yet been filled. She says she expects us to get our invitations soon. This is all really good news.

Applications complete- now send us an invitation!

September 17, 2014; S/P Application Day 81: 

Today I received word from my volunteer supervisor that my final letter of recommendation had been sent to the Peace Corps. Now it's time to kick back, and wait to hear from placement ....

Why haven't we heard from placement yet? I just want my invitation! 

Final Reference Contacted! Hurray!

August 26, 2014; S/P Application Day 59:

Today I was CC'd on an email from my PC recruiter to my final reference. Hurray! Once I get confirmation that he's sent in a letter of recommendation, then all of our application elements will be completed. After this, there's nothing to do except wait and hope to hear from placement.

Last Reference Figured Out

August 20, 2014; S/P Application Day 53:

I still hadn't heard back from the PC about my final reference, so I decided go to our recruiter's Community Drop In Hours at the same local coffee shop we had our interview. I'm really glad I went. I was able to meet with our recruiter and have a nice chat with her. It turns out she's been away at a conference all last week, so my request to have the final reference email resent had gotten lost in the scuffle, Our recruiter said she'll send it out again for me, and that it's not a big deal that it's been delayed since Placement probably wouldn't have gotten around to reviewing our applications yet anyway.  I also got to meet a few people in the area who are interested in applying to the Peace Corps, and had a nice smoothie while we chatted. All in all, not a bad way to spend an afternoon,.

PC *still* hasn't contacted my volunteer reference

August 8, 2014; S/P Application Day 41:

Still no word from The PC regarding my final letter of reference. Today I called the PC recruiting office and left a message on the Northeast Regional Recruiting Center's answering machine. We'll see if that helps?

PC still hasn't contacted my Volunteer Reference

August 4, 2014; S/P Application Day 37: 

Still no word from The PC regarding my final letter of reference. I've sent an email to our recruiter to ask about this again.

Nominated!

July 28, 2014; S/P Application Day 30:

Received reply from our recruiter today. We learned our first choice, Zambia, does not accept Health & Education combo couples, which is disappointing. However, our recruiter was happy to nominate us to our second choice: Cambodia. She is sending in the paperwork today. No mention was made of my missing reference. 

Later in the day, we received our official nomination email! I was nominated to work in the Health Sector and Sam was nominated to work in Education. Our tentative departure month is July. As soon as I got the email, all the disappointment I felt about not going to be able to go to Zambia disappeared (well, most of it any way), and I'm pumped... There was no location specified in our nomination, though, so I guess that's still up in the air, although in her previous email our recruiter did say she would nominate us to the Cambodia program.

Emailed Placement Preferences to our Recruiter

July 26, 2014; S/P Application Day 28:

Today I emailed our recruiter with out list of nomination preferences- we also added Cambodia to this list since it looked like they were also looking for Health & Education volunteers in the Summer of 2015. The final list (in order of most to least preference) was Zambia, Cambodia, Guyana, Kyrgyz Republic, Moldova. Also in this email, I asked our recruiter about my volunteer supervisor's reference form. Will wait on response.

Reference not contacted?

July 25, 2014; S/P Application Day 27:

Today I learned that my Volunteer Reference was never contacted by the Peace Corps. Perhaps this is a spam-filter problem, but it's frustrating. My volunteer reference is a returned Peace Corps volunteer himself, and was very positive about my applying- I'd really like for his letter to be part of my application.

Interview Day

July 22, 2014; S/P Application Day 24:

This morning Sam and I had a really great interview with our recruiter at a local coffee shop. Our recruiter (whom Sam and I had met on a few occasions before at info sessions etc) was super nice, and just like the PC website says, it was more like a conversation than a traditional job interview.

After a brief greeting and overview of the process, Sam and I were both interviewed individually, during which time we were asked a list of pre-determined questions (pretty much all of which can be found on the Peace Corps Wiki, although we weren't asked the playground one. That one's weird.) It took about an hour for each of us to get through.

Once we finished our individual questions, we were both asked to answer some questions together as a couple. I was warned by a RPCV who served as part of a married couple that they would ask really intimate questions, and would want to know "everything short of what's your favorite position". But this wasn't really our experience. More or less, we were asked to go through the discussion points that we were prompted to discuss before writing our couples essay questions in the application.

I'm not sure if they're still part of the written application or not. In case they aren't, I'm gong to include them below because I think that they're really important conversations to have with your partner before you apply to the Peace Corps together. While we were writing our applications, Sam and I took our time with these discussions, choosing nights when we had the energy to devote to serious thought, and not trying to rush through too many at once (this was entirely due to Sam's patience and insistence that we take our time, and it was the right thing to do. I was too impatient, I wanted to rush through them all at once).

• As a couple, what do you consider as some of the advantages and disadvantages of serving in the Peace Corps at this time?
• How specifically does each of you deal with stress? How does your spouse or domestic partner’s reaction to stress affect your relationship?
• What support systems do you currently use when you face difficult situations? Whom will you rely upon during your Peace Corps service for support in addition to your spouse/domestic partner? What coping mechanisms do you plan to employ to effectively deal with difficult circumstances?
• Identify a challenging situation or event that you have experienced as a couple. How specifically did you handle that particular situation? What did you learn from that experience?
• If a Volunteer becomes pregnant she might be medically separated from Peace Corps service and sent home. How does this policy affect your current commitment to serve 27 months in the Peace Corps?
• Undoubtedly, at various stages of Peace Corps service one of you is going to feel more successful than the other - in learning the language, initiating projects, assimilating into your community, etc. How have you dealt with differing levels of success in the past? How have you supported each other when one of you is doing well and the other is achieving success at a slower pace?
• While each spouse/domestic partner in a couple has his or her own duties as a Volunteer, many Volunteers have found that couples are often treated as a single unit in their communities, and may be expected to answer for their spouses/domestic partners in terms of work and social commitments when their spouses/domestic partners are unavailable. While such expectations and treatment may be completely normal according to the local culture, some Volunteer couples have found such experiences to be very frustrating at times. Please consider how you may cope with such situations as a Volunteer, and as a part of a couple.

- Peace Corps Volunteer Application

When we had answered our Couples Questions, we were given a chance to ask any questions we had for our recruiter. Our questions mostly centered around our timeline, and thrilled to learn that our recruiter felt that a departure next spring to early summer was probable. She concluded the meeting by looking through the openings she had for married couples and giving us 4 countries to which she could nominate us. She told us to go home and do a little research, and send an email back to her to let her know to which program we would like to be nominated. This was awesome for two reasons: 1) Hey- we're being nominated! Awesome! and 2) we get to pick to which country we'd like to be nominated- now, that's no guarantee that we'll end up actually going there, but it can't hurt, right? The countries we were given to consider were Zambia, Guyana, Moldova and the Kyrgyz Republic, assignments to all of which leave in the spring or early summer of 2015.

Needless to say, I'm in going research crazy right now. 

Reference Letter Update

July 21, 2014, S/P Application Day 23:

Heard back from my second reference that their letter had been turned in. This leaves my Volunteer Reference and Sam's Personal Reference to be returned.

Interview Scheduled

July 15, 2014; S/P Application Day 17:

Today Sam and I received an email from our local recruiter to schedule an interview in 1 week (July 22; S/P Application Day 24). I immediately reply to confirm interview time. Later in the day, out application status was changed to "Interview Scheduled". I am jumping out of my skin excited and nervous at the same time. I've been going through the interview questions posted on the wiki and thinking through the answers in preparation. I've found that it's a really helpful exercise- not so that I'll have canned answers ready to go for the interview, but because they're all really important questions that you should know the answers to for yourself. 

References Contacted

July 1- July 12, 2014; S/P Application Days 3- 14:

We've heard back from a few of our references that they have been contacted by the Peace Corps. As of today we know that one of mine and two of Sam's letters of recommendation have been submitted to the Peace Corps by our references. Keeping track of everything is exciting for me, but has also been generating a lot of anxiety.

Application Status Update

July 3, 2014; S/P Application Day 5:

The first change in our status in the Peace Corps Application Portal occurred today: we went from "Application Received" to "Application and Health History For Received". Not big news, I guess, but I've been waiting to do this for a while, so even little things feel significant to me right now.

Peace Corps Application: Submitted

June 28, 2014; S/P Application Day 0

We've been working up to this for a while. Almost 4 years, in fact. What took us so long? Somehow we never really got enough momentum together to actually fill out the application and apply. We've started the process several times, though.

In winter of 2010, I decided I wasn't ready to apply to medical school. I worried that I hadn't seen enough of the world to go back into academia, then to be thrust into a career as a physician that would dominate my life for the next 10 years to 15, finally to be spat out as a 40 year old soccer-mom who had no direct knowledge of the world outside of her own upper middle class white American experience.

So Sam and I spent the beginning of 2011 researching international volunteer opportunities. We settled on the Peace Corps for a multitude of reasons. They don't make you pay to volunteer. They have a comprehensive reintegration benefits package for returned volunteers. They look great on a resume or grad school application. The length of service is long enough that you have time to more fully integrate with the local community. Their language training is top notch. We also happen to feel that their record of service is impeccable and the manner in which their programs are implemented leads to responsible and sustainable development, which was an important factor in our decision making process.

They did, however, require that we be married. (They've since changed this policy, but we didn't know that was going to happen at the time.)

So, instead of applying to the Peace Corps, in the spring of 2011 we got engaged. We didn't just get married because we wanted to join the Peace Corps together- we got married because we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together. But I'm not going to lie. The Peace Corps marriage requirement was a big impetus for us to end the post-college cohabitation phase and start what I'm sure we'll later refer to as our 'adult lives' in happily married bliss. Our wedding was in the fall of 2012, and while we had intended to fill out our Peace Corps application while we were engaged, this turned out to be a massive underestimation on my part of just how difficult and stressful wedding planning actually is. So, there we were, December of 2012, newly married and ready to apply to the Peace Corps.

And then we didn't. I'm not really sure why. We did go to an information session in January of 2013. And we each started applications... but then we didn't ever finish them. I'm not really sure why. Perhaps it's because the Peace Corps application is a massive buzz kill of inane paperwork in the form of an incredibly obnoxious web-interface. (This, too, we've learned is due to change imminently to a more user-friendly option, but again, too late for it to be any good for us). More or less, we spent the entirely of 2013 wasting our time at jobs which, while satisfactory, weren't really fulfilling.

Suddenly it was January of 2014, and our 5 year college reunion is coming up. Deciding that enough is enough already, Sam and I started the applications in earnest. Well, more earnestly than before at least, it still took us about 6 months to finish what (apparently, according to the Peace Corps) takes most applicants 2 weeks.

That brings us to today: June 28th, 2014. We're finally ready to submit our applications. It also happens to be my cousin Mike's wedding day. We're in a hotel room outside of Tanglewood MA. We've got to head to the service in a few hours. We've spent the morning proof reading our applications. Or at least, I have. Sam was still writing one of his essays. We got an email a few weeks ago that a new, streamlined version of the application (which would cut processing time from a year and a half down to 6 months) is coming out in the beginning of July. They're taking the whole application portal down tomorrow, so we've really got to finish and submit our applications today. If we had known that we could have cut our paperwork in half and submitted our applications in more or less the same time frame back in January, we perhaps wouldn't have spent the last 6 months agonizing over this application process, but such is life.

We submit our applications within a few hours of each other. We each receive an email with our Candidate Reference Number immediately after submitting, and within a few minutes have also received a set of emails with instructions on how to access our Medial Application Portal and our Health History Forms. Health History Forms will be filled out and submitted later tonight (**edit(( this took about 30 minutes). Application Status is listed as "Submitted/Received" in the Application Portal.