So, I’ve been helping a friend of mine with her State Department application and I dug up my old application essays. Although, most of the hiring process for the Foreign Service is confidential and we’re not allowed to talk about it, the initial application requirements for FS Specialist job are publically posted on www.usajobs.gov… and one of the elements is a series of job specific essays AND a ‘Personal Narrative’.
Looking back at my old application, the essay that caught my eye was my ‘Personal Narrative’, which is nothing more than a “Hi, this is who I am, why I’m awesome, and why I want to join your club”… it’s basically, you in 5000 characters.
Anyway, I’ve been doing this whole blog thing for quite some time and I figure there are some new readers out there thinking, “Who the heck is this guy?... and when is he gonna learn how to proofread?”, so I thought it would be fun to update my ‘Personal Narrative’ and post it as a reintroduction of sorts… so… here it is:
“If my memory serves me correctly, I spent most of my childhood vacations in the backseat of a 1970-something gray Chevrolet station wagon while touring the United States with my parents and older brother. By the time I was twelve years old I had been to every state except for six. Today that number stands at four.
What I remember most about these trips are not the endless hours arguing with my brother, now a patent attorney, about who was trespassing into whose personal space. It’s not the color my mother’s (mathematician turned housewife turned math tutor) knuckles as she reached for the dashboard each time she felt my father was unsafely tailgating. What I remember most about these trips is the obsession my father (accountant turned IBM salesman turned real estate agent) had with playing Willie Nelson’s ‘On the Road Again’ each time we saddled up for the next leg of our epic family adventure. At least that’s what I hear in my memory when I envision the picture of my distant youthful self standing in four states at the same time at Four Corners Monument. The song also plays in the background as I recall driving three very hot hours out of the way of our original destination to visit the anti-climatic Craters of the Moon National Park. Willie Nelson continues to sing as my flash accidentally goes off in the darkness of Wind Cave, as I visit Alcatraz, Pipestone, Bar Harbor, and even as my father fends off a knife wielding thief at a Dairy Queen in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, and as I take a rock to the face at a rodeo in Oklahoma.
Each road trip ended at home in Atlanta. A place that, besides our summer tours of the U.S., I never left until taking a theatre scholarship at the College of Charleston.
In the summer of 1999 I moved to Manhattan for four months to attend a summer film program. Most of my education came from the city itself. I took on the city alone. Some predicted it would eat me up, but in turn I ate up the city. For the first time in my life I was given the chance to completely immerse myself into, what was for me, a foreign culture. I amazed myself with how easily I assimilated.
At the end of that summer I returned to Charleston and quickly finished up my final year and graduated with a B.A. in May 2000. My college years were successful. I had been elected President of Center Stage, the campus theatre organization, and appointed to the Dean of the Arts Student Advisory Board at the beginning of my senior year.
Afterward I returned to the place of my birth with no intention of staying. I simply planned to save money and focus on graduate school. I worked accounting temp jobs with various Atlanta-based companies including Turner and Racetrac Petroleum. Eventually I stumbled into an arts center that I had frequented in my youth and where I had first fostered my love for theatre. Shortly after meeting the new coordinator I was offered a part-time job, which ended up being the start of a seven year tenure with the Cobb County’s Cultural Affairs Division.
Although I started my career intending to peruse theatre as a profession, I quickly realized that I had a rare skill set. My educational focus on theatre gave me event planning and logistics coordinating skills, ease at public speaking, a love for presentation planning, and a very comfortable customer service approach. These qualities were coupled with a skill set I inherited from my family which included attention to detail, organizational, mathematical and problem solving skills. This set of skills has proven to be a successful asset for Cobb County and then later for the State Department, who I applied to on a whim in 2007 only to be snatched up immediately.
However, it has not been all work. The passion I have for life overflowed in 2005 when I met Serena, a newly returned Peace Corp volunteer. We fell in love, quickly married, and began a family. We are now the proud parents of a four year old boy named Grayson, who is learning more and more about Serbian language and culture every day, and a nine month old boy named Gilliam, who was born in London during my wife’s maternity medevac.
These days I’m a long way from being that little boy in the back of the station wagon. But at the same time, I’m now the dad with the obsession with Willie Nelson. I could hear him singing at my first flag ceremony, I can hear him singing during my R&R’s, during my son’s birth, and when I wipe the tears from my wife’s face as I’m about to board a plane to Pakistan for a year. We’re always ‘On the Road Again’ and we would not have it any other way.”
BTW: The part about my dad fending of the knife welding thief at Dairy Queen is 100% true (as is everything I wrote in my narrative)… and the rock I took to the face in Oklahoma probably explains quite a bit.
