Career update

I meant to blog about it a while ago, but I passed the State Department's QEP review so I'm flying down to Washington, D.C. on the 23rd of March for my interview. It will last all day but I don't know much else about it. I'm still excited by the idea of working abroad but I'm not sure if the Foreign Service makes sense anymore for Daniela and me. She is on the verge of getting a job offer from MIT's development office and that would be a really great opportunity for her. I found a website that links to the blogs of Foreign Service Officers and reading some of them worried me. Depending on where we go, Daniela might have a very limited opportunity to work. I hadn't thought of working in the Foreign Service as necessarily holding her back, but it might. We talked about it and I'm still going to go down for the interview, but if I don't get a call back it will make our lives that much easier.

We've been in our new apartment for two weeks and I still don't have any job prospects. Our friend Amy works in Central Square and she got me two temp jobs in her office. I stuffed envelopes one day and did data entry on the other. Very exciting stuff, but anything helps I guess. I've made excellent use of LinkedIn but most of the financial firms in Boston simply aren't hiring right now. I got in touch with a Brandeis alum at Fidelity and he has been spectacularly helpful. He passed my resume around and told me that they would probably start hiring again in a few weeks and that I should just keep my eyes on the website until then. If I get a job out of this, I owe that guy a nice bottle of Scotch or something. Is it OK to do that? It's not like illegal campaign contributions or anything, right?

Finally, I applied for a job teaching the GRE and SAT at Kaplan and I have a group interview/presentation in just a few days. I enjoyed teaching in Japan and as a TA at Brandeis, so this is something that would be both helpful until I find permanent work and enjoyable. In the first stage of an interview at Kaplan you have to prepare a 5 minute presentation on something so I chose "How to Write a Haiku." I just learned how to write 'Haiku' in Japanese so I can wow them right at the beginning. Or not. Probably not.

The Stimulus Package Still Sucks...

Barack Obama's February 9th press conference wasn't disappointing. I'm not sure the Wall Street Journal is correct in its assertion that the questions were pre-screened. If the only information the Wall Street Journal has on this is that President Obama had to ask where the reporters were sitting then I'm not convinced yet. Does President Obama favor certain reporters? Of course. Did he see the actual questions before hand? If he did, why did his answers seem so unrehearsed and why did he call on a Fox News guy who asked him a dick question?

The stimulus plan sucks though. I'm not with the Republicans on this one, but if Obama's checklist for success is the creation of 4 million jobs, then I think the plan sucks. The final bill was for $787 billion, which means it costs the government $196,750 to create a job. That seems grossly inefficient.

A solution to our crappy health care system would have a better impact on the economy than this. Health care is a huge cost levied on US businesses and one of the reasons neither Ford nor GM make money on their auto operations. Toyota and Honda have margins of around 8% on those same operations. I'm not going to be impressed by a recovery until Ford and GM become profitable again and start to take back domestic market share.

Or until Ford's share price climbs back to $30, making my $500 investment worth $8,000. Cause that would rock.

Our New Apartment!

A tour of our new place in Boston!