I'm loving my job at OCDC, but I can't take it with me when I go back to BYU with Erin in a couple months. (A couple months!) I'll have to find something new (because I am most certainly not going back to my old BYU job). After last year's experience, I could really go for something easy, mundane, and mindless. (Like vacuum the Harold B. Lee Library for a couple of hours a day, and that's it!) Or...
...go again for my dream BYU job: MTC teacher.
For those of you who don't know, the Missionary Training Center is where all church missionaries go before heading out to their assigned missions. The biggest one is in Provo, Utah, right next to BYU (and that's the one where I stayed for two months before I went to Cordoba). At these MTCs, missionaries learn what it is they are actually supposed to teach, teaching skills, spiritual preparation for two years of missionary service, plus lessons in the language they are supposed to speak in their missions.
Most missionaries loathe the MTC. It's a small campus of close to 2,000 missionaries at any given moment. It's where the two-year separation from family and friends begins, and this is where it hits most missionaries that they will be very far away (geographically and in terms of communication) from their loved ones. A lot of missionaries (mind you, these are 19-year-old boys mostly) can't handle up to 12 or more hours of study a day in a tiny classroom. This is also where you start having a companion, and it might take some getting used to having the same person near you 24/7.
But, I loved it! I was lucky enough to have a great group: Savanah Fernandez (now Rodriguez), Lauren Reidhead, Spencer Salmon, Jaime Bowen and Bradee Hughes. We were each so different and had so much fun together, even though we were detained in a closet of a classroom for two months straight. We had two great teachers, Phillip Shorten and Tony Montague, who loved their time as missionaries and kept that missionary spirit alive for us. And I credit my tenure at the MTC as being a major part of the testimony of the gospel that I have today.
(from left to right: Elder Bowen, Elder me, Hermana Fernandez, Hermana Reidhead, Elder Salmon, and Elder Hughes)I think even as early as when I was a missionary at the MTC, I thought working there when I returned to BYU would be a fulfilling and enjoyable job. Even when other Cordoba missionaries thought I was crazy for wanting to go back to the MTC, I still looked forward to the day when I would.
Well, here's hoping that this fall semester will be that day.
Instead of a job interview, what I do is a lesson out of Preach My Gospel (the missionary manual) in front of a panel of MTC evaluators. Recently they made available the option to teach a lesson on video and then email them the link. So, here are my two videos. The first one is the "teaching" and the next is a brief "self-evaluation." Enjoy!
MTC Video on Picasa
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