The City of Brotherly Love

My heart isn’t set on a career (or even a next job) with the State Department, though it has a lot of appeal – as do other government jobs. I think that the Obama administration is doing a lot to make government service an attractive option (not to mention that they are hiring, and in this job market, not many others are!). And that’s how I view the Foreign Service – it’s an attractive option. So much so that when I didn’t make it to the next step after my oral assessment (and I think I’ll talk about that next, since I’m not going in order anyway) I decided I would try again; many people who don’t make it the first time do make it on their second or third try.

I had to start all over with a new application, and when I was invited to take the written test, I didn’t jump on it right away (was I in Chicago? Not sure of the reason); by the time I did, all of the slots in New York were full. What to do? Wait for more slots to possibly open up (they did say they would add some) or travel to a site with slots. I found one in Philadelphia – and I wanted to spend more time with friends there anyway; the Phillies weren’t in town but you can’t have everything. I called the Peace Corps to make sure my departure date would be after the test date (that’s when they told me my confirmed date was June 21) and scheduled the test.

Going from Southampton to Philadelphia, I reasoned, was like going from Azrou to Errachidia – about two hours to Manhattan, with the walk from the Hampton Jitney to Penn Station the moral (though in no other way) equivalent of waiting for the taxi to fill in Midelt. Now that I have traveled great distances in Morocco for short amounts of time, going to Philadelphia one day and coming back the next didn’t seem a big deal. I arrived in plenty of time to walk from 30th Street to the test site, Community College of Philadelphia. The test was scheduled for 3:30 but since I was early, the test administrator let me start early.

The general knowledge portion was fine. There was a question that stumped me that related to a country I might have been reading a lot about lately, but I am not at liberty to talk about the test (I looked it up and still don’t really know if I answered it correctly). Then there was a personality part – to show leadership, working style, etc. (you can find out about the format of the test by going to the careers.state.gov web site and by ordering a sample test, so I do feel I am at liberty to at least say this much). The next part is reading a writing sample and correcting the English – which is for me, well, not to boast, and this sentence notwithstanding, a piece of cake. There might even have been writings about places where I have lived or visited, which made this portion more entertaining. I breezed through those three parts and then took the full allotted time on the essay. This is the part where they give you a topic and you write a point of view. They don’t grade your opinion but rather your ability to have a point of view and support it. If I don’t make it further, it’s because my arguments were somewhat weak – last time I had a topic that I’d been reading about so I had support points at the ready; this time the topic was interesting enough but I’m not sure I said much at all.

I finished early and had a chance to walk around, seeing some of Philadelphia’s beautiful downtown:

City Hall

Love Plaza

And then I went up the Main Line to stay with friends. We had breakfast the next day, and then I had a little more time to walk around, seeing:

The Benjamin Franklin National Memorial (one of 44 National Memorials) – inside the Franklin Institute


And walked to West Philadelphia, where on the Penn campus I saw:

More Love

More Franklin

The last time I walked down Locust Walk was September 11, 2001, when we heard that the bus that was going to take us to JFK for our departure to Morocco was delayed. I remember thinking how leafy the Penn campus was – almost every time I’d been there in the last 20 years it was wintertime.


I met an old friend for a cheesesteak, and since we were walking right by the eye doctor’s office I stopped in to say hello. Then I took the subway (when was the last time I took the subway in Philadelphia – 1984?) downtown to the Thomas Jefferson Hospital travel clinic for my last shots. By the time I left (as in Chicago, I had to stay after I had the shots to make sure I wouldn’t keel over) I didn’t have time to do anything else – I’d thought I might see the new Art Museum Perelman building or go to Reading Terminal Market or somewhere else that had recently been written up in the Times. Of course, I didn’t have to get back before dark – I just had it in mind that I would, so I didn’t write down the times of any trains later than the 3:25. That’s okay – it was nice to get home at a reasonable hour, especially when I was thinking I was leaving on June 21 and wanted to get off to a rip-roaring start today – but it just whetted my appetite for another Philadelphia trip! It’s a great city with a lot to offer (not to mention other friends who I didn’t have a chance to see on this brief trip)!