Missing Sarmale

EU, my love

If any of you Romanians might remember, we had in highschool some English textbooks called so poetically (not!) "English, my love". In the meantime, I have been unfaithfull to that, learned some other languages, and above all, changed my "love" object.

Then, I keep saying that I am busy and I wanted to explain a bit that quite a big part of my time now goes to studying. Yes, I graduated, thank God, that is not it. I want to try my luck with some competitions to become a EU fonctionnaire. Mostly because everyone agrees now it's the moment. Romania is due to join... soon (I'm not going to make predictions...) and they need qualified and enthousiastic Romanian people to work for the EU institutions. Maybe a few details regarding that.

An open competition, or concours, is the only way to get in there. It is horribly difficult and there are lots of stages of the selection according to the profile of the competition. Generally, you have to pass a multiple choice test on EU knowledge and something that they call "verbal and numerical reasoning". That is the hell. If you pass that, you can consider yourself at least a bit reliefed. EU knowledge is quite tricky, but generally doable with some studying. The other part is a set of annoying questions to test your logic, those who have it... It is actually a mixture of logic and foreign language knowledge, since you can't do it in your mother tongue. And, they say, highschool level maths knowledge. That makes me laugh. Girls, have we ever seen maths in highschool?...

For the competition I am currently studying for, there are 9000 something people on about 200 places. It is a bit worse than uni entrance exam and slightly worse than the Commission stage. And I am now and then encouraging myself that it is not that bad, half of the people just subscribe, half of the remaining are not well prepared, half of those panic anyway and never finish.... And so on. But I decided to give it a bit more attention and prepare. We'll see.

Lucky me, as usually, my job includes quite a lot handling EU related information, and I'm currently updating the website info in this regard. So, undercover studying.

Well, this whole EU thing started at university I guess, but let's face it, I am probably more fond of the Europe vision than the bureaucratic institutions' work, but I can't help noticing that they pay at least twice as much as I get now... That can satisfy my vision too.

posted by Dana @ 4:34 pm