Tuesday, September 20, 2011

New Job! [not in Mali yet]

I started my first day of work this past Friday as an assistant in the registration office of a local art college.  Luckily, it's not even a 5-minute drive from my house and I could walk if I wasn't inherently lazy. It's only a 6 week stint as I'm just replacing a lady who is currently on maternity leave. The day the job ends is coincidentally the day I'm supposed to be leaving for Philly to meet my stage. All I've been doing at work the last 3 days is tedious transcript checks because I'm not well-versed enough in the ins and outs of the registration system to be answering phones, which is a shame because the drop period is ending so they've been ringing off the hook and we always seem to  have someone in the office out sick for the day.  So in reality, the office is really down 2 men at the busiest time of the semester. It's not ideal work but 7.5 hours of pay per day will give me some travel money while I'm in Mali.

I guess I can write a little bit more about my job because I find some of it interesting and it kind of takes me back to the end of high school. The interesting part is that now I find myself on the other end of the spectrum (the person reading the application) and I realize the same things I laugh at when I read these kids' applications are the same stupid things I said not so long ago. Really all I'm supposed to be doing is verifying that all enrollees have sent in their final high school transcripts with their second semester grades and date of graduation so we can confirm that they've actually finished high school after their acceptance, and if they're transfer students, they also need their additional up-to-date transcripts from their previous school(s). It's as boring as it sounds so I find ways to entertain myself. If they're incoming freshmen, they have SAT or ACT score reports in their files so I compare those results with their transcripts for kicks. I find that this art school, like I suppose any state school would, accepts a wide variety of students. Some kids have almost straight As and some have so many Ds and Fs, I not only wonder how they got in to college but how their school districts let them graduate with those marks. One girl had a load of Cs on her transcript but scored above a 2000 on her SAT. How do you get a 700 on the Math section and a C in Algebra II both semesters? Another girl went to an LA public high school and had a cumulative 3.95 GPA but when I looked at her test scores, she scored a 980 (out of 2400) on her SAT and an 11 (out of 36) on her ACT. The same chick who ranked 5/588 in her class scored in the 6th percentile for the national average on the SAT. It doesn't matter how bad of a test-taker you are, you can't be THAT bad. California, like most states, has a state exit exam where you have to pass the test and your required classes before you're allowed to graduate but the standard is so low, it should be the elementary school exit exam rather than high school. On the flip side, if they raised the standard and made the exam harder, as it should be, that puts the state in limbo because then the schools become overcrowded and even more financially burdened. So California is graduating kids who can't can't give you the definition of the word "synonym," can't read past the fifth grade level, and can't convert a basic fraction into a decimal. Nobody wins.

Another thing I do for entertainment when my eyes are bugging and my headache is starting to develop is read their essays. In general, art students aren't the most captivating writers. I admit I normally read the essays of international students because they're the most chuckle worthy. So you score a 65 (out of 120) on your TOEFL (English proficiency exam) and you're coming up with sentences like "His usage of the rich array of color warms the palate and invigorates the senses"? LOL. Right.

Another common trend I find funny is a majority of the Asian students write about how they have "typical" Asian parents who had wanted their kids to take up the violin and academics but someone/something inspired them to pursue their "true passion" even if that meant disappointing their parents, who will only be pleased if they become "a doctor, lawyer, or nurse." Which is funny because I really don't know many Asian lawyers of nurses. A lot of kids write about one of their parents becoming ill or dying and ALL the grad students write about how they just never really found satisfaction in their undergraduate pursuits and now is the time to go after what makes them happy, blah blah blah. What I was getting at earlier when I implied that I would probably shake my head at my own application essays if I read them today, from the perspective of an administrator, is how we think we're making an impression by over-emphasizing details (for example, adding strong adjectives) or dramatizing ordinary events when in reality, we're just blending in with the crowd and adding ourselves to the "too ordinary" pile, which is some cases becomes the "DENIED" pile. If you say that you had nothing better to do one day than go parade through an art gallery and one work of art struck you so vividly that you instantly knew from that moment you wanted to be an artist, you don't sound very believable because we all know that things don't really happen that drastically. I still remember one of the questions on my Duke application simply asked why I was interested in Duke. I spent several sentences trying to flatter them, talking about how "prestigious" of a university they were and how I would be "honored" to be a Blue Devil and yada yada, when I should have just been honest and said that their brochure that came to my house junior year as part of the daily "college mail" pile really caught my eye, I was interested in learning more information about all the clubs, programs and student groups they listed as offering, I did further research on their website, talked to a few current students and alumni, and Duke was a place I could have pictured myself attending for all the above reasons. Not saying it would have affected my outcome, but at least I wouldn't be sitting here today, as a college grad, and cringing at the essays I wrote as a newly minted high school senior. Oh well.  Hindsight is 20/20.

Enough about my job for now. I'm about 6 weeks away from Mali and I'm feeling pretty neutral about it. One of my best friends, who now lives in New York, was home for 10 days and she was asking me if I'm excited about leaving next month because I've been talking about the Peace Corps since high school. I told her I'm excited but not bursting at the seams just because I'm skeptically anticipating what's to come. On the one hand, I'm really excited to meet my fellow stagers and the Mali volunteers already in country but who's excited about no running water, electricity, or wireless internet!?! She told me that she's always thought I've had good foresight and if the Peace Corps was designed for anyone, then it was designed for people like me. That was a nice pick-me-up but I'm going to remain as reserved as possible, which we both agreed was my natural mechanism for preventing disappointment. I'm really kind of concerned about some of the folks in my stage who just seem a little TOO excited. What happens when the excitement of being a newcomer to the Peace Corps and a resident of Africa wears off and the harsh realities of living in the African bush rush in? The last thing I want to do is ET because I'm "not liking it," it's "not what I expected," or it's "not what I signed up for." So I keep my emotions guarded, my anticipation low, and my expectations at close to 0. Definitely excited for Philadelphia though and meeting all those wonderful people. Just about 5.5 more weeks of the good life.