So I posted a few months ago that I received an interview for the JET program (a program where you go teach English in Japan.) It’s a pretty competitive program, so I was happy that I was selected for an interview. Fast forward to February: I went to the interview, thought it went pretty well, and started waiting to hear the news. Well, I finally got the news today–and I’m an alternate. What this means, basically, is that I could be selected to go–or I could not. I could get a call next week, or sometime next August. Or I could not be selected at all. There’s no way to know. Keep in mind that I started preparing stuff for the application process back in NOVEMBER. Apparently, in some very rare cases, people get a call in October. This means it could be nearly a year until I get my final answer for this damned job. And of course, if I don’t get selected, I will just never hear from the program again.
Personally, I think this is all pretty fucked up. I am basically treating the “alternate” nonsense as a big fat no, and it’s really depressing–I’m going to try to just get on with my life… which means I will have to start the job search all over again. (I’m going to apply to some other “teaching English abroad” type places.) Besides the stress of that, it’s my final term of college, I am taking three 400 level classes in my major (and one 300 level), I still need to take the GRE at some points, and frankly, it just makes me want to cry already, thinking about the next few months of my life. To make a stressful few months even worse, the entire time, I will have that tantalizing possibility of the JET program swooping back into my life and fixing at least a little of the shittiness. But then I also have the equally possible, uh, *possibility *of it not happening.
I almost wish I just had a no at this point. Not really, because I’d probably still be sobbing into my metaphorical beer, but damn. I really, really wanted this job… I’m going to be worrying about this for quite possibly the rest of the school year AND the summer.
Pretty mundane and pointless, but man. Job searching sucks, I think we can all agree…