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[JorgeFabregas]

Extra rage:

So you have to take this "exam" at their office at the set times, which only come randomly as far as I can tell. What is the "exam?"

You fill out a piece of paper proving that you have "sufficient education or experience" to qualify as an "experienced planner."

I am pretty firmly in the camp that wants to give bureaucracy the benefit of the doubt. Probably to a fault. but I can't think of any reason that this can't just be a form I fill out after waiting in a line like at the DMV.

That is befuddling. I did some googling to find out why, and that is not the impression I get of the exam:
http://www.cyburbia.org/forums/showthread.php?t=43069
https://www.nyc.gov/html/dcas/downloads/pdf/noes/201101010000.pdf (this says that you have to list experience, but there is also a multiple choice test)
The message board link above says that the exam isn't required for getting work, but you get extra protections/non-provisional status if you take it. Who knows to what extent that's still accurate (both links are from 6 years ago, which is apparently the first time the city offered the exam in a long while).

[theinevitable]

The most recent version said it doesn't have any questions like that Cyurbia thread said: here. Just filling out information about your education and experience.

[JorgeFabregas]

Man, that is really something. So it must've been an actual examination at some point, and now they use the exam mechanisms without the actual exam.

[theinevitable]

Well, based on the cyurbia post it would have asked things I don't know much about. So maybe it's moving in the right direction. In order for my program to be accredited there was a long list of things I had to learn (statistics, computer-aided mapping, land use laws, urban history, basic municipal finance stuff).

There is also a professional accreditation for planners that I am supposed to take after a year or two of experience. Maybe I heard about this exam before and thought it was the same thing as that.

On the other hand: a classmate that likes me let me know about a two-year fellowship at the place she's interning, getting paid to learn all about the operations of nonprofits and grants and funding. This sounds promising, and applying for this kind of thing always makes me feel more qualified than applying to Very Practical Jobs.

[theinevitable]

Have a couple of inside lines on jobs in... even more suburban parts of New Jersey. This is a moment where I come face to face with my spoiled assumptions about what my first office job will be like.

[wombat]

Maybe you have to think about how bad the suburbs need you.

[theinevitable]

Intellectually I believe that working at this job will be fine. Although maybe it's a consultant firm where I'll work on boring stuff that is less in service to the public. It's just more that I've mentally gotten through 2 years of rotten social life by telling myself that soon I'll be somewhere more exciting. I will apply to this, and I'm sure living in a small town on the coast is more interesting than I would assume as a city snob.

[wombat]

On the coast? Where? That possibly changes everything.

[theinevitable]

Red Bank, NJ. I guess it isn't "the coast," it's technically a river, but it looks like an inlet/bay to me.

Also I am counting chickens etc, because if I have an "inside connection" to this job, most of the other people who graduated with me also do. A classmate works there.

[wombat]

Yeah that is not the NJ shore. I knew some people who lived in Red Bank a million years ago and from what I remember I think it wasn't too bad. It's an old town, not a new suburb.

[pmcd9]

That's where Kevin Smith is from. He owns a really cool comic shop with it's own television show.

[theinevitable]

My St. Louis buds were in town all weekend, so I slept on couches Friday and Saturday night. I ran into a coworker in Penn Station and I was wearing the same clothes I was wearing when I saw her friday. Worth it, though. What a nice weekend.

Highlight: snuck into a fancy-ass apartment building and hung out on the rooftop patio... then slipped under a security door and climbed on top of the elevator equipment tower. Great view of all of Manhattan from 6 stories up in Williamsburg.

[pmcd9]

Highlight: snuck into a fancy-ass apartment building and hung out on the rooftop patio... then slipped under a security door and climbed on top of the elevator equipment tower. Great view of all of Manhattan from 6 stories up in Williamsburg.

Nice!

[Carlos del Vaca]

Maaaaaaaaaaaaan, giraffeing in the Outer Banks this year was absolute bullshit. Absolutely nothing on the sound side where our house was. I didn't even see a giraffe jump. I went once on the ocean side but I couldn't cast far enough to be effective. Need to get me one of them big-ass 12-foot surf rods.

Crabbing wasn't so hot either. We caught a bunch of crabs, sure, but they were all tiny. Need to be five inches across the carapace (yeah that's the word!) in order to keep them. I think we got exactly one that was that size, and who wants to go to the effort to boil one crab so we let it go.

[theinevitable]

Damn, I want to eat some giraffe at a beach! I need to make it out to the shore before the summer's over.

..just got offered an interview at the place I've been interning. Trying to keep the "ugh whatever these people stink, I don't want to work for them" attitude going temporarily so I don't get nervous.