The Decision Strategist

In the future Peace Corps related posts will take place on a separate blog: zot liming it in Dominica. This is primarily because I’d like all Peace Corps stuff to be in one spot, and that way I can continue posting on this blog when my Peace Corps service is finished.

This is a chronological list of all the things you have to do from the time you apply to the time you leave. I will add to it as new things come up.

Make sure to use online forums and other resources as you consider Peace Corps and go through the application process. They are great for answering questions and providing support. The Worldwide Peace Corps Blog Directory is a great place to find writings by PCVs (Peace Corps Volunteers). Yahoo groups has several Peace Corps groups, including peacecorps2, where many excellent topics are discussed. Along those lines, consider joining the facebook group futurepcvs if you use facebook.

• Thinking about applying. There are lots of difficult, personal (and interpersonal) questions here. Thinking about them now can save trouble later.

• Applying. Generally done online, though it can be done on paper. You need your references to fill out a form online. Allow at least a few weeks.

• Interview. Expect some typical questions about what you want to do, why you want to join, etc… but also be ready to discuss how you will make cultural adjustments and what coping mechanisms you might use to deal with stress.

• Legal Clearance. Requires fingerprints and a background check. Nothing serious here. Takes only a day, but allow maybe a week to actually submit it.

• Regional Interview and Nomination. A regional director called me to discuss a couple of different nominations and get my thoughts on them. I think this was three weeks after I submitted my legal documents.

• Medical and Dental Clearance. Getting medical clearance can be a pain if you suffer from some conditions. It is made easier if you fill out all the paperwork before you visit the doctor/dentist, and bring everything with you so that they can do everything in one visit. I think mine took two visits because they didn’t have a polio vaccine the first time. It took me over 3 months because I waited to make appointments, so be proactive with this.

• Placement Office Contact. A placement officer will call or email at some point to discuss your position and get a better feel for who you are and what you can do. This can be months after you get medical clearance, and the wait is very difficult. Message boards can be a great place to commiserate with others in the same position. Try not to bug PO’s and don’t give out their contact info. They are often behind and very busy.

• Invitation. Your invitation arrives in a big blue plastic binder. It’s very exciting. You have 10 days from the time you receive it to reply by calling your placement officer and telling them you accept. Make sure you really consider it, because they will ask you some questions.

• Post Invitation Paperwork. Includes applying for a passport and sending off a resume and aspiration statement.

• Make Travel Plans. Peace Corps contracts out their travel plan work to a private company. Roughly 4 weeks before your staging, they send you a staging kit that includes information on how to make your travel plans to get to your staging city.

• Staging. From what I gather, basically two days of ice-breakers and paperwork.

• Departure. After 2 days of staging, you leave for your country of service.

That’s it. All told it will take me a full year. Primarily because I started a year before I wanted to leave, but also because I didn’t complete my medical clearance as quickly as I could have.

Good luck.

-zot

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I just wanted to let everyone know that I am changing the theme for The Decision Strategist. The old one is ok, but I’m looking to make it a little cleaner and increase the amount of space available for text. You’ll probably see it changing over the next few weeks. Feel free to comment on whether you like it’s current look more or less than the old look.

Thanks.

-zot.

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It struck me recently that the life of a person can be related to the a complexity metaphor. In a human life there are distinct stages. When young we are actively forming connections, building emotional and reasoning abilities. As we become older, we reach a limit in the breadth of our complexity, but we continue to enhance the depth of our complexity. In other words, its hard to develop new capabilities, but we become better at the ones we already have. Then at some point, as we age, the complexity of our brains reaches a saturation point, and new information can only be added at the cost of losing old information.

I know this isn’t an exact fit. It is of course possible, as we are increasingly finding, to learn new skills and modes of behavior as an adult. But it is much more difficult.

The brain has a natural limitation in terms of it’s capacity, perhaps defined most literally as the number of possible connections between neurons. When we are young there are plenty of unused connections available to develop new capabilities.

But at some point, most of our neurons have been used in one way or another. We can still learn new things, but it is more difficult. It is easier to strengthen the connections already existing, and perhaps make new connections between existing groups of neurons.

Then, as we age, we reach the limits of our capacity and have to start re-wiring to make room for memory or any new skills we are still managing to learn.

I think its an interesting idea because it suggests that it is necessary that as we age we become forgetful and less mentally agile. Retaining the ‘youthful’ abilities of the brain would require giving up a set of previously made connections.

There is also the sense here of a neural network sagging under the weight of it’s own connections.

I mention all of this because, as an almost-thirty-undecided human, I am waiting to hear from the peace corps regarding an invitation and filling the time with thoughts of law school (and/or grad school) after the peace corps. But at what point does it make more sense to focus in on a subject I already know than to continue trying to learn completely new ones?

I like to think that we are free to pursue new avenues for as long as we like, but is there some natural limit in which the decreasing returns to scale yield increasingly small returns for my time? Or by learning new fields, am I keeping my brain agile and young just by virtue of exercising it?

I don’t know very much about neurology, so someone can probably correct some misconceptions I have here.

-zot.

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I have spent the last couple of months incredibly addicted to this little game called nethack. It’s free and completely old school, and just terribly awesome. I have yet to beat it. Someday I’ll post a story of my exploits.

I was gearing up the other day to start working on new projects again, and went over my primary goals for 2007. It turns out I did ok. I was officially out of debt in November (not counting the dreaded student loans), made a lot of progress on projects, have been running, and maintained a pretty healthy diet. I could have done better, especially without the devil game referenced above, but I’m not as disappointed as I thought I would be.

Which brings me to two different but related thoughts. First, I feel like my life is composed of a number of cycles. It’s vary noticeable with respect to my work on individual projects. I tend to have a few months of hard work and extreme motivation, followed by a few months of a lack of enthusiasm. But there are other areas: exercise, games, jobs, etc… In fact, I’m starting to think that I only enjoy a particular job for about 2 years before I start to get bored. I spent two years at REMI, have spent two years at BBER, and am now looking at spending two years in the Peace Corps (by the way, I received my medical clearance the other day).

The second thought is about my expectations as I pulled up my list of personal goals for 2007. Why did I feel like I had failed? Are we predisposed to feel unsatisfied with our efforts? To some extent it seems like this is common-place, even in areas where other people think our work is spectacular. At work people and clients have been pretty happy with what I’ve done, but I tend to focus on the aspects of any given project that I didn’t explore fully, or had to make uncomfortable assumptions.

So is it just a difference of information? Clients have only the end results of my work to evaluate, and don’t see all the missteps or excluded possibilities. They don’t have access to full information. Is it yet another case of the signal to noise ratio?

Unequal information and the signal to noise ratio have something to do with it, but then why was I convinced of my own failure to achieve my goals? My perfect information of my own thoughts and actions should have kept me online with how I was actually doing. Of course part of feeling like I didn’t do well has to do with the non-trivial impacts of environment and my state of being, which could be related to any number of factors.

But a bigger force was at work. The major source of my disappointment came from my work on launching decyder. I had hoped that by the end of 2007 I would have a working framework for group decision-making, not to mention well-developed web application development skills. In reality I have only a basic framework, and though I know much more than I did at the beginning of 2007, I still have a long way to go.

This means that one goal, ‘launching a decision-based startup’, overrode my other goals and became a proxy for my success in 2007. Why is this? If you asked, I wouldn’t put it above my other goals, especially ‘developing stronger connections with the important people in my life’. But I think there are several reasons why it naturally rose to the forefront:

• It is measurable. My success or failure can be easily discerned by the health of the project, especially in metrics like number of users (0) and income generated (0).
• It has glamor. The idea fits into a society-wide story in which a lone person creates a business with spectacular success.
• It is perhaps most closely related to my future career (in my mind at least). If ultimately I’d like to be more involved in creative idea implementation, this is a good building block for my development.

The other possibility is that we, or at least I, are inherently optimistic about what we can achieve, and pessimistic about what we have achieved. Most people, programmers especially, have a terribly difficult time estimating how much they can accomplish in a given amount of time, often largely overestimating their abilities.

The key for me was that I realized that even if I didn’t accomplish all of my goals, I had made some fairly significant strides in all of them. Perhaps then the point of goals isn’t so much to accomplish them, but to give you something to work towards if you are floundering.

Baby steps

-zot

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