Ranking Your Bid List

Given a list of 23 cities, how do you decide where to live for the next 2 years? This is obviously not a problem for most people, but it's on the mind of all the IMS hires in my orientation class. I can't speak for them, but I can certainly speak for me!

Our first draft bid list was straight from the gut. We literally just listed our top 10 and called it a day. After that, we used some of my wife's fancy decision analysis ninja skills to determine our priorities and reorder our list into our second draft. We further researched each of our top 10 choices at the Overseas Briefing Center (OBC) and finalized our rankings. Our final list has a couple 'strategic' rankings, but is mostly just an ordered list of places we would like to visit for an extended period.

When making our decision, we considered:
1) Housing distances from work and town.
2) Weather
3) Opportunities for regional travel and sightseeing
4) Post size
5) Differential Pay
6) Strategery.

Fortunately, our son is not in school, so we didn't have to factor in the local schools (yet). My wife and I are pretty tired of living in the suburbs and having to drive literally everywhere, so we're really hoping to spend some time living in a walking friendly area. Weather plays a part in that also, since it doesn't matter how close things are when it's negative 70 outside. As avid travelers, we fully expect to use our new locale as a starting point for quite a few trips (hey, that's what vacation time is for!).

Our only concession to strategic bidding was to group a bunch of the 'hot ticket' posts around the 7-10 spots. This forms a 'wall' of posts we're unlikely to get (since they'll probably top other people's lists), but makes it less likely we'd get pushed to even lower choices on our list. You know, we hope. Of course we might get any one of them, and that'd be fine too; I'm not totally opposed to a cushy first post.

There are three main pay modifiers for posts in the Foreign Service: Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA), Hardship Differential, and Danger Pay. Hardship Differential has double duty for our first post, according to my Career Development Officer (CDO). As extra incentive for more adventuresome first posts, she gives preference during the second post bidding, based on first post Differential. She called this equity (it's actually the sum of the Differential and Danger, but only one of the posts on our list has Danger). So whoever has the highest 'equity' from their first post, will get their first choice from the bid list for their second post. This will continue until everyone has a post. Although I do not want to pick my first post based on equity, it did give me some incentive to slightly lower my bid on the posts with zero Differential. Let's face it, who wants to get last pick next year?

Jeff, over at Ramble On, created a Google doc for our class to plug in our tentative bid lists to 'compare notes.' The trend data from that has been outstanding. At time of writing, 14 of us have plugged in our list, and only one of the posts is not in somebody's top 4 (and it's someone's 8th). Additionally, all but 4 of the posts are in somebody's bottom 4. That's some crazy diversity!

Three Weeks of Orientation, Week 1

After completing my first week of Foreign Service Specialist Orientation, I can confidently say that I must be the worst orientation 'student' ever. With my sickness on Monday, the snow day on Thursday, and ice stopping me from leaving my house for half of Friday... it's been an abbreviated week. Obviously, I'm hoping to improve my attendance in the coming weeks. The commute hasn't been as bad as I'd expected, averaging an hour and 10 minutes each way. This is way worse than I would ever accept if I got to choose my housing, but I can live with it for a handful of months. (Let's face it, many people have much worse for years on end.)

The sessions so far have mostly been interesting, with a few duller ones peppered in (I guess we do occasionally have to learn actual job related information). As expected, the high level guest speakers we've had (ambassadors and the like) have been excellent. The orientation coordinators have also been a wealth of knowledge. Every speaker so far has had many years with the service and has been very forthcoming with anecdotes.

On Friday, my wife and I met with my Career Development Officer (CDO). We briefly discussed our post preferences with her and then went to the Overseas Briefing Center (OBC) to further research the posts on our bid list. We had already mostly organized our list, but between the boxes of information in the OBC and the post videos we watched, we ended up shuffling our top 7 around. That being said, any of our top 10 (or even 15) would be cool. I feel bad for our CDO; the normal IMS class is 5 to 12 students, ours is 23... and optimization of bid lists gets exponentially harder with more people.

First Snow Day

Snow Day! I've been working in and around government facilities for years, and have built up no small amount of animosity to all the snow days they've gotten when my company was open and expecting me to show up. Of course... now that I'm on the winning side of that arrangement, I have to say: "Snow days are awesome!" Especially because there's no way I would have been able to make it in to work, had I wanted to. My area got 15 to 21 inches (according to the weather channel, looked like less to me, but still!) which really had me wondering if I'd woken up back in Syracuse. 

Keep at it, buddy.

This morning found me shoveling my driveway, with my delighted son running around on the newly exposed concrete and occasionally taking his turn with the shovel. He's more cute than he is helpful, but that's ok. Anyway, snow turned to rain through the day and later into a 20 minute hail storm! This was the largest hail I've ever seen, probably a 3rd of an inch in diameter, and just tons of them. 

More importantly, this impromptu day off provided my wife and I with an ample amount of time to chew our way through the post list that I'd received on Tuesday. After several hours of nit-picking our decisions and preconceptions, with the help of the Overseas Briefing Center's website and my wife's awesome decision analysis, we can confidently say we have the first draft of our bid list! Huzzah! Tomorrow I meet with my Career Development Officer, during which I assume she will gently guide me into realizing that my last pick is actually my first pick... but we'll see!