Hi all --
Welcome to my first Peace Corps blog post. Tomorrow I depart from my home in Northern California to Washington, D.C. for what's called "staging". At staging, I'll meet the other volunteers in my cohort (of which there are 16) and do one day of orientation activities with them led by D.C.-based Peace Corps staff. The next morning, we'll all leave our hotel at about 3 a.m. to catch our flight to San Salvador, by way of Miami. After that, it's ten weeks of in-country training, after which I'll join a small community in rural El Salvador where I'll serve as a Community Organization and Economic Development (COED) Volunteer for two years.
A little bit about myself: I just graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in Political Science and Human Rights. I chose the University of Chicago because of its reputation for rigor, to which it mostly lived up. I grew up in Mill Valley, California, a picturesque suburb just across the Golden Gate from San Francisco. I played baseball growing up, and did some theater as well, and toward the end of my high schools years became active in Democratic politics. I'm a huge San Francisco Giants fan, as well.
Peace Corps entered my radar midway through college when at a used bookstore in Carrboro, North Carolina, I stumbled upon a weathered book written by an MSNBC host whose name I recognized from the TV. The book's sub-title, "How politics is played, told by one who knows the game", piqued my interest, as at the time I was halfway through my summer internship in the Capitol Hill office of my local Congresswoman, and was just becoming interested in the nuances of Washington. So I bought the book.
About 150 pages into Chris Matthews' Hardball (written well before Matthews' program of the same name became a mainstay in progressive households around the country), Matthews offers an anecdote in which he describes a meeting from his Peace Corps service in Swaziland in which American and British officials and the Swazi Minister of Commerce shared in their dissatisfaction with the slow rate of progress in the newly-independent kingdom. It wasn't a remarkable story (Matthews was intentionally describing a relatively mundane event), but the image of a young American working with local partners to figure out how to bring prosperity to an impoverished land made an impression that stuck with me. This fresh little glimmer of inspiration coincided with my budding interest in international affairs (inspired by my coursework, my Hill internship, and the events unfolding in the Arab world), as well as a growing sense of bewilderment at my peers at the University of Chicago who were beginning to aggressively position themselves for jobs on Wall Street. The more I observed my talented, brilliant classmates gravitating toward the sectors with the most lucrative starting salaries, the more troubled I began to feel at the starkness of global inequality, and the more I felt a need to educate myself about it, and address it.
So here I am, two years later, untested, about to embark the first leg of a (hopefully) long career of working toward reducing inequality in this highly unequal world. From time to time, I'll be documenting my Peace Corps journey here in this blog. I hope you get something out of reading it.
Here goes!
Frank
P.S. Since many prospective PCVs are interested in application timelines, here's mine:
8/29/12 - Submitted application
9/17/12 - Received an email from local recruiter giving me a one-week deadline for references to submit their recommendations
10/10/12 - Peace Corps interview at Chicago recruiting office
10/20/12 - Nominated for COED assignment in Latin America, leaving July 2013
Some time in November, 2012: Received legal clearance after submitting my fingerprints via mail
3/25/13 - Invited to serve as a COED Volunteer in El Salvador with a July 23, 2013 staging date
5/2/13 - Received final medical and dental clearance after submitting results from physical and dental examinations
Welcome to my first Peace Corps blog post. Tomorrow I depart from my home in Northern California to Washington, D.C. for what's called "staging". At staging, I'll meet the other volunteers in my cohort (of which there are 16) and do one day of orientation activities with them led by D.C.-based Peace Corps staff. The next morning, we'll all leave our hotel at about 3 a.m. to catch our flight to San Salvador, by way of Miami. After that, it's ten weeks of in-country training, after which I'll join a small community in rural El Salvador where I'll serve as a Community Organization and Economic Development (COED) Volunteer for two years.
A little bit about myself: I just graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in Political Science and Human Rights. I chose the University of Chicago because of its reputation for rigor, to which it mostly lived up. I grew up in Mill Valley, California, a picturesque suburb just across the Golden Gate from San Francisco. I played baseball growing up, and did some theater as well, and toward the end of my high schools years became active in Democratic politics. I'm a huge San Francisco Giants fan, as well.
Peace Corps entered my radar midway through college when at a used bookstore in Carrboro, North Carolina, I stumbled upon a weathered book written by an MSNBC host whose name I recognized from the TV. The book's sub-title, "How politics is played, told by one who knows the game", piqued my interest, as at the time I was halfway through my summer internship in the Capitol Hill office of my local Congresswoman, and was just becoming interested in the nuances of Washington. So I bought the book.
About 150 pages into Chris Matthews' Hardball (written well before Matthews' program of the same name became a mainstay in progressive households around the country), Matthews offers an anecdote in which he describes a meeting from his Peace Corps service in Swaziland in which American and British officials and the Swazi Minister of Commerce shared in their dissatisfaction with the slow rate of progress in the newly-independent kingdom. It wasn't a remarkable story (Matthews was intentionally describing a relatively mundane event), but the image of a young American working with local partners to figure out how to bring prosperity to an impoverished land made an impression that stuck with me. This fresh little glimmer of inspiration coincided with my budding interest in international affairs (inspired by my coursework, my Hill internship, and the events unfolding in the Arab world), as well as a growing sense of bewilderment at my peers at the University of Chicago who were beginning to aggressively position themselves for jobs on Wall Street. The more I observed my talented, brilliant classmates gravitating toward the sectors with the most lucrative starting salaries, the more troubled I began to feel at the starkness of global inequality, and the more I felt a need to educate myself about it, and address it.
So here I am, two years later, untested, about to embark the first leg of a (hopefully) long career of working toward reducing inequality in this highly unequal world. From time to time, I'll be documenting my Peace Corps journey here in this blog. I hope you get something out of reading it.
Here goes!
Frank
P.S. Since many prospective PCVs are interested in application timelines, here's mine:
8/29/12 - Submitted application
9/17/12 - Received an email from local recruiter giving me a one-week deadline for references to submit their recommendations
10/10/12 - Peace Corps interview at Chicago recruiting office
10/20/12 - Nominated for COED assignment in Latin America, leaving July 2013
Some time in November, 2012: Received legal clearance after submitting my fingerprints via mail
3/25/13 - Invited to serve as a COED Volunteer in El Salvador with a July 23, 2013 staging date
5/2/13 - Received final medical and dental clearance after submitting results from physical and dental examinations
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