Ride the Gerbil at the Sexpo!

-- Poster advertising the annual Adelaide Sexpo. It is what it sounds like.

Now that I have your full attention, here’s an update on the past few months of my life. (By the way, I did not get to ride the Gerbil. I heard it was overrated anyway.)

First, some exciting news -- I’m officially a master! I finished up my last semester two weeks ago. Commencement is next Friday at the South Australian Museum. My family will be coming into town next Wednesday. They’ll be here not so much for the ceremony as for the free food and booze. My niece is coming for the baby kangaroos. And cake.

And now for the important stuff everyone wants to know--

Q: What’s after graduation? Are you staying in the land of bouncing marsupials?

A: I leave Adelaide the weekend after graduation and will be taking my family to Melbourne via the Grampians National Park and Great Ocean Road. My family will be flying back home from Sydney and on the day they fly out, Henry is flying in to join me for two weeks of travel through northern Australia. After a day and a half in Sydney, we’re going to roadtrip from Broome to Exmouth and Ningaloo Reef for snorkeling, diving, and beach bumming for a week. Then we’re going to head back in the easterly direction to Darwin for a truly “Aussie outback experience.” (In other words, I don’t know what we’ll be doing there yet, but I need to plan that soon.) After Darwin, Henry will fly to Cairns to the Great Barrier Reef for more diving and I will fly back to the mother land. I will be on U.S. soil in late June.

Q: So where are you moving to?

A: Not sure. Someone’s couch, perhaps? I reckon that I will probably be on the go for most of the summer. I want to take a few months off to re-center my chi. I’ll be on the west coast for a bit and might return east sometime in July or August.

Q: Are you ever going to get a job?

A: Job schmob.

Q: Slacker. Seriously, what’s next?

A: Do you recall when I flew to Los Angeles a few months ago to take the exam for the Presidential Management Fellows Program? I don’t know which bribe worked, but I was selected as a PMF finalist. For whatever reason, the selection process was very competitive this year and I was only one of three students out of 23 accepted from CMU. Usually, the acceptance rate is about 50%. I reckon it must’ve been that life experience/personality section that made the difference for me. It appears that having good attendance in high school has really paid off. Sweet! (Yes, the exam actually asked me about my attendance in high school.)

I have until March 2008 to be placed in a federal agency and participate in the fellowship. That may seem like more than enough time, but it is, after all, the government that we’re talking about. I interviewed with a couple of agencies over a month ago and still haven’t heard a response from them despite multiple follow up emails. So even though I’m a PMF finalist, I still need to actively seek out agencies and go through an interview process and wait for an offer. Theoretically, it should be much easier to land a government job as a PMF but I’ve yet to see this happen. If you want to learn more about the PMF, check out their website.

So the short answer to this question is -- I’d like to do the PMF if I can get a placement at an agency I want (e.g. EPA, DOE), but I’m not going to put all my eggs in one basket. I will be applying for other jobs in the meantime.

Q: Okay, that has some semblance of a plan. Good on ya, mate! What have you been doing since finals week?

A: I recently returned from a five-day trip to the red centre of Australia to see Uluru (or Ayers Rock), Kings Canyon, and Kata Tjuta (or the Olgas) with Casey, fellow American and member of the new class of Heinz students. It was a great trip, but I’ll talk more about that later in a subsequent post.

I’ve also been playing a lot of Ultimate. I finally got back into playing in February. It has been awesome, and I owe it all to my mate Raj whom I met at a party in January and who invited me to play on his hat league team. One night at hat league, I bumped into this guy Phil whom I had met months earlier at a women’s practice (he was there to help coach) and he invited me to play on his fall/winter social league team. Feeling ambitious, I also signed up for a second league playing women’s. So during the semester – when I was up to my eyeballs with coursework, group projects, and being a TA for statistics – I was also playing league twice a week. Although it seemed like an insane decision at the time, it was probably one of the best things I’ve done all year. Because I <3 ULTIMATE FRISBEE. I was only crazy to not have started playing right when I first got here.

Q: Okay, okay, enough about Ultimate already. Are you EVER going to finish blogging about that South East Asia trip and Oz roadtrip with Lin-head from five months ago?

A: Maybe, but motivation is lacking. Check back here in a few days and you’ll have your answer.