Washington D.C. baby!

Last month Kevin took the Foreign Service Officer Exam, and last week we found out that he passed! It's an incredibly low passing rate (about 20-30 percent of applicants), and Kevin and I are so excited about this!

This is just the first step, however. Since he got his results, he's had to write some personal narratives and have a Chinese language phone interview. He aced both of those (in my humble, unbiased opinion), and now he just gets to wait. The next step would be to get invited to come to Washington D.C. to participate in an oral exam sometime this spring. We really hope that happens, but if for some reason it doesn't, we have a trip to Disneyland planned as a backup. I never thought I'd say this, but I hope we don't go to Disneyland.

When Kevin took the exam last month, he spent a lot of time studying for it beforehand. If it were me and I were taking it, I wouldn't know where to start. I'd figure that since it's such a random test, I'd just study random things randomly. Kevin had a systematic approach, though. A large part of the exam was based on US history, politics, and culture. Talk about broad! Kevin decided to memorize all the US presidents and the major events in each of their terms. And if you think about it, that covers just about all of American history. Plus it give him a nice backbone to keep events chronological and organized in his mind.

Another thing Kevin did well was to use his time wisely. I generally tend to procrastinate everything. If I were studying for the Foreign Service Exam, I'd be surfing wikipedia the night before the test, hoping to come across some useful tidbits of information. If I had to turn in some personal narratives by a certain date, I'd be "writing them in my head" for a month but not actually turning them into words until the night before they were due. But Kevin is awesome and turned them in two weeks early, after polishing and perfecting several drafts first.

If I were the Foreign Service, I'd snatch this guy up.