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.
