Looking for PMF Stuff?
For those of you who get to this page because of your PMF searches, I stopped blogging about the Presidential Management Fellows program (and pretty much everything else) on this particular blog, but there is another place where you could go if you’re interested in discussing it.
Heeding Inevitability
After nearly 3 years of constant blogging, I am surprised that I’ve been so content on the free WordPress. I started on Blogspot way back when, and it wasn’t sophisticated enough for me (it still isn’t). Oh, I could have mucked around with the HTML and CSS (I am fluent in both), but WordPress was so much easier to get going. And I would have kept with this free version, too, if I hadn’t started chafing at the restrictions.
So I am striking out into a new frontier. I bought a domain and a hosting plan, whipped up a WordPress install that I can control, and will be migrating this blog over. Everything that’s here will remain here. You are all free to continue your conversations here as you’ve been doing, but I do hope that at least a few of you find your way over to the new site. In any event, I doubt I will be posting much here now, except to answer in the comments. I hope we can continue our vibrant conversations at the new site.
So what’s the tally? 149 posts, 728 approved comments, and a smidge over 48,000 views. So thanks for that. I don’t do this for money, so all I have are collected stats. My hope is that I can do even better in the future.
Come and visit me: http://blog.aaron-helton.com
We can resume our discourse there.
PMF Orientation 2009: Open Thread
Wow! An open thread twofer!
In this thread I want to collect the experiences of anyone who attended one of the three 2009 Presidential Management Fellows 3 day orientations in Shepherdstown, WV. This includes the following three sessions (I attended the December session, in case anyone wanted to know/cares):
Session 1: October 13-15, 2009 (Tuesday – Thursday)
Session 2: December 15-17, 2009 (Tuesday – Thursday)
Session 3: January 20-22, 2010 (Wednesday – Friday)
It doesn’t matter which PMF class you’re from, just that you attended one of these sessions. Also, this is NOT a survey, and I am not affiliated with the PMF Program Office. I am merely interested in providing a rich information set to the comparatively small group of people who go through this program or are considering it. Look at it as a “day in the life of” kind of discussion as well as a reinforcement of the networking you did when you went to the orientation (it’s up to you to figure out how to reconnect with someone you met at orientation; I’m just providing a discussion thread).
What did you think of the orientation? What were some of the most memorable features (good or bad)? Can you share some of your totally awesome/mind-numbingly awful team building experiences, preferably in a non-incriminatory fashion? Have fun 
2010 PMF Assessment: Open Thread
[Update 2/1/2010: There aren't too many ways to say this: None of what I say on my blog constitutes official or even semi-official advice. My only perspective is that of a PMF appointee who went through this same process last year. While it is true that I work for OPM, who administers the PMF program, I would like to assure you that all of the information I present, either in the articles I write or my comments on the site, are drawn from publicly available sources and do not constitute proprietary or inside knowledge. What you choose to do with this information is up to you. If I've misrepresented something, it's my personal fault; simply point it out and move on. The analysis and opinion represent my own thoughts on the subject and do not represent OPM's position, nor can any of them be considered official information, so take that for what it's worth.]
While walking down the halls of my office building yesterday, I saw a sign indicating that the PMF assessment was in progress/had taken place (it could have been up all week for all I know; I just happened to see it yesterday). For those of you who took it in DC, you know what office building I’m talking about. Anyway, I guess it means that testing season has kicked off. I’m not sure what the assessment schedule is like for the other locations, but it’s entirely possible that the assessments are on different days in different locations, so let’s get a sort of roll call (to be fair, I *could* go ask, but I have neither a true need to know nor the desire to go chase something like that down; plus, I would rather let anyone who took the assessment or is planning to take it have the discussion). When and where did you/do you plan to take the assessment? What did you think of it? Are there any last minute tips (for those of you who took it already) you’d like to share with everyone? Finally, did the materials on my blog, Courtney Fong’s blog, or the PMF website help you?
Noughties Recap Part 2: Personal Journey
The Journey by alicepopkorn
The time in a person’s life between 20 and 30 is a time of tremendous personal growth. Many who go to college finish out their degrees early in that time, and some of those go on to graduate school. Most are starting out somewhere in some field, chosen or otherwise imposed by circumstance, usually hoping for advancement and the opportunity to find meaningful work. And a good number will get married and have kids in this time frame.
My circumstance was similar, but I just had to go off and do things in a different order. Having washed out of my first attempt at college in 1997, I instead joined the Army that year and was married by 1999. So that sets a bit of the stage for how the decade played out.
Ten years ago today, my wife and I went to a dinner and dance to celebrate the Millennium. We enjoyed the dinner, but I must confess I’ve never been much of a dancer, and I was positively a stick in the mud. To this day I do feel a bit badly about being unwilling to dance, but I digress. We attended the party knowing nobody else in attendance. You see, I had been in Kosovo for 6 months and had only been back in Germany with my wife since the fourth of December. This had been our first year of marriage, and of it, we spent a grand total of three or four months together on account of both the Kosovo deployment and the fact that it took nearly four months to get her to Germany in the first place. Somehow she had weathered all of those things and plenty of others in all our years of marriage; why she puts up with me I’ll never know 
So my first year of the decade was spent entirely in Germany, working, traveling, and just enjoying what the country had to offer. That, of course, came to an end when I received orders to go to Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. One might think that, being from Texas, I would have been thrilled, but in fact it was the last place I wanted to be (well, before Afghanistan and Iraq became options). Nevertheless, we made the best of it, and I spent my final 3 years as a soldier there in El Paso. It’s not to say there were no positive aspects, but it’s so far removed from any place else that it might as well be another country itself.
It’s probably a good time to note that I was in El Paso in September 2001. I think I will save the details of what I was doing then for 2011, when I can do a proper 10 year retrospective on it, but suffice it to say 9/11′s impact on the Army was profound, and its effect on me operated on multiple levels. There was of course the emotional one, and that can’t be discounted, but the impact it had on my enlistment was sufficient to throw my future plans into disarray. One of the results of declaring war on terror was something called “stop loss,” which has been termed a backdoor draft. The idea was to keep soldiers trained in critical and understaffed fields from leaving the Army. IT was one of those fields.
I remember adopting a routine for a while of going to work and getting online first thing in the morning to check the stop loss status. I did this every day for a while, and I will admit the idea fostered in me a bad attitude. At the time there was nothing worse in my mind than to know that I was simply waiting to leave the Army but not knowing when I would be allowed to. It never got bad enough for me to give up any hope of an honorable discharge, but my spirits were pretty low. In fact, a good portion of 2003 could be considered one of the low points in my career.
During our stay in El Paso, both my wife and I (childless at the time, aggressively so) concentrated fully on our studies, with the result that I finished my long overdue undergraduate degree in the Spring, and she in the Fall, of 2003. It was at this point that my enlistment ended. What I hadn’t counted on, of course, was that the economic impact of the Dot Com implosion meant that I would have a hard time finding a job in my field, which from the start has been Information Technology. I went to stay with my parents for a couple of months after I got out of the Army so the wife could finish school and I could look for a job in a place where I had reliable internet access. It didn’t really pan out, and by Thanksgiving we were nearly out of ideas. To complicate matters, we had finally decided to conceive our first child, and so we had a baby on the way. With no job prospects and nowhere to go, we applied for food stamps, she applied for Medicaid, and I got my paperwork together for unemployment, which I would start collecting near the end of December.
Sometime during this period, we took a trip to Austin to follow a lead, not for me, but for my wife. She managed to land a long-term substitute teaching position in Round Rock, while I continued to throw resumes into the void. We only looked at Austin because I had some friends living there and because it was sizable enough that I figured I could find a job (Amarillo and its surrounds, had family but few job prospects in my field). Otherwise it was essentially random. But that’s where we moved. Three months after that I got a contract job at Dell doing customer support. Looking back, I figure everyone in IT probably has to pay their dues in call centers. It was the worst non-Army job I’ve had (and I’ve not had many). Fortunately I only needed to be there for two months, since a job at Hire.com I had interviewed for two months prior was suddenly offered to me. At nearly twice the pay, I jumped on it and never looked back. Sure, I was a contractor for a year, but I could actually afford to feed my family.
Shortly after starting work there, my first child, Daniel, was born. My wife and I had been married a full five years before having a child, and I can look back and divide my marriage into two convenient segments: before kids and everything else. The whole time before kids was one way, and, well, everything else has changed. The saying goes that kids change everything, and I concur.
A year and a promotion later (or within a couple of months), we bought a house, our first. Somehow we were sensible about it and only bought what we could afford on one income (and in fact LESS than what we could afford). Shocking, I know! But that became an important factor later.
We stayed in Austin from January 2004 to June 2009, four and a half years, and during that time we also had our second child, Thomas, and actually got kinda cozy there. Things were going pretty well, in fact, and most of our decisions involved the next project we were going to undertake on the house. The only reason we moved is the loss of my job in 2008 and my the entrance into the Presidential Management Fellows program in 2009, which brought me here to Washington, DC. The details of 2009 are more fully explored in a separate retrospective (I’m certainly glad decades don’t end too often; I don’t know how many more retrospectives I can write).
How did you grow and mature over the last decade? Feel free to share in the comments!
