Choosing An Organization

It took a while and I looked into a variety of organizations, including the Peace Corps and even the UN, but after kicking the idea around for a few months and looking at options I decided to put in an application with Project’s Abroad last December. I liked Project’s Abroad initially in part because they had the best marketing materials. As a former advertising major I know that is probably not the best reason to make a decision by Nothing wrong with marketing and advertising but it is usually a one sided story. Let’s face it, it would be really stupid to market yourself by talking about your organization's fails.

But I did some digging into them and they have been around since 1992. I found some bad comments about them on the internet but by far the comments were good. And the bad ones tended to be the parents of teenagers who, I’m reading between the lines, seemed to get themselves into trouble partying too much. I got the impression the parents thought PA would babysit their kids but I guess if your kids are prone to party to the point they get into a lot of trouble then you should probably not ship them off to a foreign country and get mad with somebody when things go sideways. Send them to Outward Bound instead where they are in the middle of nowhere and can't buy beer.

Anyway, besides nice marketing materials, they have some experience working with what they call “work breakers” or people in the middle of their careers. Nobody else talked about this but instead focused on 20 something or retired people. They were also very flexible where you could start and stop whenever was convenient and have a huge number of projects available all over the world. I participated in a couple of question forums and asked some questions and put in an application.

A few weeks later they accepted my application and the clock began ticking.