1 Week Down

Only 5 more to go. Week 1 was a lot of information and even though we are mostly just sitting and absorbing the info given to us, I feel incredibly wiped out. We received our bid list on Tuesday. There are about as many jobs as there are people in my class, but we have to bid on all of them. We get the choice of bidding every location/job at either High, Medium, or Low, but, of course, the decision on where to send you is based on the needs of the service, so we have been cautioned not to fall in love with a certain job since the only thing that is truly certain in the FS is that you should remain flexible!

For us the process will be a bit more complicated. A was given what is called a Class 2 medical clearance because of his Apraxia. This means that any post we're sent to must have the appropriate care available and we must verify it through MED before we can be given clearance to go to post. In order to figure out which posts on our bid list were actually open to us, I poured through what medical care is available at each post on the list (e.g. did they have a speech therapist), then I looked at the information compiled by the Office of Overseas Schools, which does mini-recaps of the international schools available at each post and states whether or not they have special education resources (and whether the ones hat do meet US standards). This narrowed the list down by about 2/3 for us. Then we used some other criteria to help sort out the remaining available posts into either Mediums or Highs (the ones we can't go to will all be Lows). It has really changed the way I had originally looked at how we might bid, and I should forewarn everyone that we may not end up in any part of the world we had expected (there are also about 20 Mandarin speakers in my class competing for the much less than 20 China posts).
The good news is that if we don't get China as our 1st post, we will definitely get it for our 2nd post (just the way the FS works if you took the S/CNL points), so we will get there eventually.