Turning now to the employment forecast

Yesterday I received an email letting me know the status of the application I submitted to the International City/County Management Association's Local Government Management Fellowship Program (how's that for a title?) back in November. The news is good! After 2 months of vetting, the fellowship committee scored my application high enough that it now advances to the second stage of the process. I am excited by this for two reasons: 1) I was quite concerned my personal statement and case study answer were not up to par, and given they counted for 70% of my total score, I pretty much felt like I did not have a snowball's chance in Hawaii when I submitted my application; and 2) Given the inordinately small number of host governments and a larger-than-normal applicant pool this year, the cut-off score to make it through to the second round was raised. These two things together have combined to make me feel a bit proud that I made it through. It is fun to be able to say I am a semi-finalist in a national search.

Fellows are being placed nation-wide, so now my application is forwarded on to all of the host governments in the geographic locations where I indicated I would be willing to work. My name is not going to the Southeast, but is going to every other part of the country. The current list of governments who will receive my application includes:

• San Jose, California (hosting 4 fellows)
• Lexington, Massachusetts
• Dakota County, Minnesota
• Dubuque, Iowa/Lancaster, Wisconsin (shared)

Because I am not interested in going to the Southeast, governments in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina will not get a gander at me. It is also still early in the process and there is a chance one or all of the following governments will decide to host a fellow. If so, they, too, will receive my application.

• Chandler, Arizona
• Alameda, California
• Palo Alto, California
• Dublin, Ohio

None of the governments have posted the job description for their Fellow. Hopefully those come soon.

I am trying not to place too much hope on the fellowship program, but feel that it would be a great transition for me. I am still looking for jobs elsewhere, including those in higher education. Part of me is ready to be done with the academic field for awhile, though, and it would be nice to have a chance to work in the field I have spent the last two years of my life training myself for.

Classes are going well. I am fast discovering this will be the busiest, most taxing, and most demanding semester of my academic career. Project Management is proving to be as intense as I heard, my exercise teacher is the spawn of Satan, and my Chicago Public Schools client for Capstone cannot seem to figure out and/or clearly articulate to my team and me the desired deliverable.

(Grammar check: In the above sentence I wrote "team and me" instead of "team and I". I believe "team and me" is correct since the sentence would not read properly if I removed the words "team and" and only left "I" had I used the "team and I" version. Was I right to use "team and me"?)

We cleaned the apartment today. It seems my job when we do an complete clean is always the floors - sweep and mop the hardwoods, vacuum the stairs, my bedroom, and the baths. I do not mind this, I just noticed the pattern. Ryan continues to clean only when I ask, but since I always make sure to ask when I myself am in the middle of a cleaning task, Ryan has always been quite accommodating.

It got fairly warm here today (if you call low 30s warm) and with the melting ice came problems. To get to my apartment, one enters through a gate set between our front building and the neighboring building and walks the 3-foot wide path back to the courtyard and my coach house. As the path opens into the courtyard there is an overhang of vines that are leafy and gorgeous during the summer and ice traps in the winter. The weight of the melting water brought down the vines today, but only to waist-height, effectively blocking the path completely. Falling ice also destroyed two of the lights positioned in the flower beds. I called our landlord and basically got, "What do you want me to do about it?" It has been pretty perilous around here with all of the ice and on top of it he gave us a BS story about why he can't weatherstrip our door, so I got a little sharp and I told him I want him to come out to his property and take care of it and its residents. We'll see if he shows up tomorrow.

Lauren and I have become pretty popular with the higher-ups in our college. This past week we had meetings with both the Dean of the college and the Alumni Association's Student Relations Committee. With the Dean we are providing student input on the college's strategic goals through FY 2011 and with the Alumni Association we are helping identify the professional development needs of the students and find ways the Alumni Association can help meet them. Right now we are looking at a resume/portfolio review, an interviewing skills workshop, mock interviews, and a networking session.

At work I am finishing a bid to serve as the host site to the 2009 Association of Campus Activities Administrators Leadership Exchange, creating presentations on Leadership 101 and Conflict Resolution, and researching service-based peer-to-peer collegiate mentoring programs.

All in all I am a busy girl. I can't believe January is already gone. I swear time is moving faster each day.

Love!

~g