Boo to testing!

Back in January, the Department of Foreign Affairs came to UW to give a talk on their post-secondary recruitment campaign. I've always been interested and to be honest, smitten, by the idea of working for DFAIT, so I applied for several jobs at the department. To do so required a mad scramble to assemble an updated resume, create a short essay (and I mean short short short) detailing my leadership experiences and so on.

The recruitment campaign also requires its applicants to write several exams at the school on a specific date. Since Agnes had also applied to the same jobs, we went together. This meant that we appeared at school, on a Saturday, at 7:15am. Egads! I was so freaking exhausted. At least I got to eat though - Agnes just rolled out of bed and came to pick me up. Hee hee.

The exams were neither hard nor easy. The first one was a generic exams testing your logic and school smart skills. They included questions that needed you to find number patterns, rotate figures around, word similarity questions, and evil evil questions that required you to create formulas to math problems. Those last ones were deadly. I hate math! The second test was a "situational judgement test." Essentially it gave you a bunch of scenarios and asked you to select the most effective as well as the least effective response. This sounds easy enough, just use your common sense and answer! Not so! Some of the potential actions you could take were pretty similar, or difficult. And in the example they gave us, we knew they didn't want the goody-two-shoes answer either (e.g. "Gee, my coworker is doing something wrong, so I should run and tell my boss." Wrong!) The final test was a written communication test. They gave us a 4 page booklet and we had to summarize its contents in 450 words. I don't know how I did on it... I think I might have been a little too concise in my writing. :S

Luckily the first two tests were multiple choice, so they were graded fairly quickly and I'm happy to say I got decent marks on them. I still have to wait for the written test to be graded. And the pain of all this is that I might not even be qualified for the jobs I applied to. The descriptions said I needed to graduate by June 2007... But I won't graduate until August 2007. Hopefully I'll slip through the cracks. Even if they do decline me though, it's good experience for when I apply next time. :)