Well, *we are finally in the beginning of our actual interviewing stages, and I've had two. I am slightly concerned about it all, but won't become truly nervous until around July 1 as that's my "OH MY GOD, WHAT IF I DON'T GET A SCHOOL" date. Up until this point, we've been told "It's too early to interview, wait til late June, don't worry." Now that its late June I feel like everything is going to pass me by and somehow wind up on the other side without a job. This is probably not the case, as I can be kind of a worrier at the last minute. I also have this annoying of habit of believing everything will work itself out on its own, so I'm trusting in that right now.
Allow me to explain what the process so far has been like... Everyone knows that when you want a job here, you get your resume together, mail it out to about 100 places right off the bat and just wait for the interviews to come rolling in. When they do, you try and juggle them all. You schedule them, and you research them, and keep all of the paperwork you collect in order and try to be as organized as possible. Well... that's not really the case here. Basically when one school is interested, we will get a form letter email from the recruiter giving us the details of the school (hours, pay, what they offer, type of school, location, etc.). They hold all interviews at 11am Korea Time, which corresponds to 10pm New York time. In the email they ask for 3 days worth of availability for the school to call you and we only have one interview at a time to interview with, as to not get anything confused. Sounds kind of efficient right?
Wrong. I'd rather not devote every 3-4 days to only one interview, and if I could, get a bidding war going between multiple schools, but that's just cuz 'I'm a business, man'. Anyway, last week I had my first official interview with a school called Kae Tae Wong. Everything was all set. I had a confirmation email that the school would call me at 10pm, and I was in my apartment by 10, all ready to go, in a quiet room, with the information up on my computer screen just in case. 10pm, 10:15pm, 10:45pm, 11pm goes by, and no ringing of the phone. I email my recruiter, they apologize, and ask if they can still call. I'm a bit of a night owl, so they call me at 1am. The Korean woman on the other end of the phone was as sweet as could be, but very broken english. We talk for 10 minutes, she tells me a bit about the school, we laugh for a second, I thought I had this in the bag. She says she likes me, and was gonna have an english speaking teacher call me back the next night so I could get more information. Well, no such call. They went with someone else. Ah well, no big deal, onto the next interview. I give my availability for 3 more days, and no phone call. School choose someone else before even calling. But fortunately, the recruiter had another school all set to go.
At 11:450pm last night, I received a call from an extremely nice woman at a school called SLP. SLP happens to be a franchised school, which means that there are 30 campuses or so throughout the country, and its attached to a University. We spoke for an hour, and I would like to think that this is the one. Stephanie, the woman I spoke with, actually spent some time in Manhattan and we chatted about that for a bit. Hopefully within a few days I'll be writing about accepting a position, but I don't want to get my hopes up, or too ahead of myself.
Time will tell... but so far, its been a very slow unpredictable process. And for the next so many nights until I finally sign a contract, you can expect that I'll be waiting by a phone at 10pm every night waiting for Asia's call.
*Also, I say "We" because I have found a willing participant to travel with, but I choose not to disclose that information at this time.
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