Professor application

Today I submitted my application packet for a position as a West Point professor in Chinese. If selected, I would start graduate school in 2015 and begin my three-year utilization tour in 2017.

The toughest part was writing the personal statement about how being a professer would bridge my past experience with my future plans. Understanding that my March DLPT score of 0+ in listening and 1 in reading put me at a decided disadvantage, I spent a lot of time trying to get the tone just right, emphasizing there's more to teaching a language than just knowing it. I also mentioned that with nearly two years before any graduate program would start, I could get a 2/2.

Still, when I found out that 13 people had applied, I couldn't imagine them picking a Chinese professor who doesn't really speak Chinese well, and just about anyone will have better language skills than me.

So we're all trying for this one, maybe two slots, and I'm guessing, like many language professors at West Point, they're branched military intelligence with prior enlisted experience who went to the Defense Language Institute. Although one foreign area officer some background in logistics, no one is from Transportation. So unless they have some weird sort of "affirmative action" program for underrepresented Army careers or a soft spot for people with strange, non-Army backgrounds going on, I don't see how I would be selected.

But that's OK, I suppose. Instead of truncating my time in Korea, it could spend more time in my command, save more money, and perhaps get another, more interesting jobs(maybe even in Yongsan!)

The question that will nag me, though, is this: if they only do one position this year and another next year, do I want to bust my brain trying to learn Chinese so I can apply again?