Pages

Monday, November 21, 2011

Andrew's craziness

This past week has been a little crazy—I, for one, am looking forward to Thanksgiving break. I think it's kind of funny that although my schedule was basically the same as it is every week I still felt the craziness of Andrew's schedule affecting my schedule. It was a little crazy at our house so it's no wonder that our pre-bedtime clean-up took probably three times as long as it usually does.

After a full day of classes on Tuesday, Andrew flew out to Denver, Colorado to interview for the Presidential Management Fellowship. His sweet Aunt Lynnea and Uncle Clark picked him up from the airport and he stayed overnight at their house, which helped keep our expenses down. The interview was on Wednesday afternoon and it went as well as Andrew could tell.
He said it was a rather odd interview—he was handed a sheet of questions to review and take notes on and then when he went into the room there was what seemed to be a panel of interviewers when in reality they were a panel of note-takers. They only asked the questions on the paper Andrew had been handed—nothing more, nothing less—he wasn't allowed to state the name of his school or his major or anything that might cause the panel to feel biased for or against him. No follow-up questions were asked about any of the answers he gave. No getting-to-know-you chit-chat occurred. It was a very dry and scripted interview.

But I suppose that's what they had in mind. I just wonder why they needed Andrew to fly all the way out to Colorado for it—it sounds to me like that type of interview could be conducted over the phone. Oh, well. It allowed Andrew a lot of time to do homework without being bugged by me or the girls.

He flew in on Wednesday night and helped me put the girls to bed before hitting the books once more.

After a full day of classes on Thursday, Andrew drove up to Kaysville to give a lecture at Weber State University about post-revolutionary Egypt. Things are getting a little messy in Egypt and there are some who question whether a revolution ever occurred or whether the military encouraged the ouster of Mubarak to solidify their slipping grasp on the regime. Needless to say, Andrew had plenty to talk about and only managed to offend one person—who asked Andrew why BYU even allows students to study Arabic and the Middle East since that area of the world is so "evil." Eye roll. This because Andrew dared draw a parallel between the American Religious Right and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Everyone else in the audience seemed to enjoy the conversation. Weber State University is pretty small but they open these forums up to community members like high school history teachers and the like so the audience was a decent size.

Andrew's professors so kindly decided to have most of his major assignments due on the Monday before Thanksgiving instead of making him and his peers fret about homework during the break. That means that Andrew has so many huge assignments due tomorrow that it's not remotely funny.

But after tomorrow life should be relatively sweet. For a while.

We won't hear back about the PMF until the end of January so we're certainly not holding our breath over that. Instead we'll do something productive, like finish up grad school applications. 

No comments:

Post a Comment