Placement Manipulation

Hello Everybody!

So I am in the process of getting my second round medical stuff into the office, and am hoping to have everything done by the end of this next week (assuming my blood tests come back quickly.) On another note I wanted to post about some "placement manipulation" I am attempting.

Before I get into this, let me make it clear that I am serious about my flexibility and I will be thrilled to serve where ever peace corps wants to send me, that being said; I have an Asian Studies specialization and it would be cool to end up somewhere in Asia. Imagine my elation when this morning I go to poke around peacecorpswiki.com and find a few new postings for deployments in January! There are only two of them but one of them is in Thailand, which would be an amazing placement for me seeing as my Grandfather (a tenured Sociology professor who specializes in East Asia) spends a lot of time there, and my mother spent three months there and couldn't stop raving about it.

Clearly neither of these trips probably went deep into the areas in which I would be working as a Peace Corps volunteer but I would still be interested in traveling to a country that everyone in my family seems to love so much. There is also the little fact that I am currently writing the last paper of my degree as a comparative study between Uganda and Thailand's approaches to prevent the spread of HIV. I'm hoping that I can put this paper on some sort of experience addendum since I'm certainly getting an insane amount of knowledge about Thailand's HIV population.

Anyways, I guess its not really "manipulation" because (as I am sure you all know), they are going to give out whatever placement they want, and you don't get much say, but I feel better thinking I have some amount of control over where I am going for the next two years, so at least there is that.

Hope all is well,
Claire