Did you go into ortho? If so, what attracted you to it? Did you join a boys club specialty because of a genuine interest in that area or was it to prove that you could do it? Both?
How often did you see combat on your tours? You served in Afghanistan, right? Did the locals there seem sympathetic to American involvement, or did they appear fed up with our extended presence? I've heard a few soldiers rant about pushing guys through training whose performance was sub standard. Do you ever encounter situations where an inept soldier starts becoming a danger? Any funny stories about abusing recruits? The only semi-interesting job I've ever worked is hand making customized lolas (vintage race cars) so I'll throw that out there if anyone is curious.
So, I've been doing ESL for foreign professionals for the last 2 years. Stop laughing, it's my real job (for now). It's paid for school, sent me around the world and given me a network from Japan to Germany to Brazil. If you are about to graduate, especially as a teacher, DO THIS SHIT. It's fun, pays well, you can work anywhere in the world and it gives you valuable classroom and presentation skills, without making you hate your life. Or, you could just ask about my real job: vagabond expat.
No, I am in Urology. I believe Orthopedics has even less girls that Urology, although it is hard to find reliable statistics. I joined a boys club because of genuine interest. I love the patients (and most of them are really happy to have a cute girl doctor, after the initial shock wears off), enjoy working with my colleagues, and the variety of surgeries is spectacular - from working under the microscope, with the robot, all the way to open abdominal surgeries. I could care less whether my coworkers are men, women, transgendered, American, foreign, white, black, green, whatever, as long as they do their job well, and they share this opinion. I do not know any girl that joined a surgical specialty to prove they could do it, it is way too much work if you do not have the right motivation, and no one at this levels cares about that anymore. That said, people have tried to discourage me from surgery - but it was just one of many things people tried to discourage me from, and obviously I chose who to listen to and who to disregard (I mostly disregarded). It was one of the reasons I moved to the US - so I did not have to deal with the misogyny in Eastern Europe.
Someone on another message board is in the process of looking for a job teaching English in Korea - he's been asking for help scripting a video for a headhunter. His undergraduate degree and work experience is in business information systems, he's taken classes in Korean, Japanese and Swahili, and in the process of taking courses for a Masters program for TESL. Is there anything else he should be doing to increase his likelihood of getting a job there?
Stop dealing with recruiters and deal directly with the schools. Largely, the recruiters are a waste of time. If he finishes his master's, he stands a better shot for university jobs, so a lot of people won't touch him until then. If he's taking some time off, he needs to explicitly say that. Get the documents and be ready to work and be flexible. Getting here is the difficult part, once you're here transitions between jobs is easy. If he's black or Asian he might have a more difficult time finding a job, which is sad but true. They just laid off a few hundred of the public school teachers, which is a trend that's expected to continue, so working for public schools is unlikely. The best way to avoid a nightmare situation is to speak in depth with the foreign teacher working there. If it's a new school or there aren't any foreigners, they shouldn't be hiring from abroad. Classes in Korean are largely a waste of time, unless it's a hobby. No school would hire a foreigner for bilingual skills unless they were ethnically Korean and had the parentage to prove it. The best two resources are <a class="postlink" href="http://waygook.org/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://waygook.org/</a> and Daves ESL Cafe.
Do you trust the Afghans to properly take over once the U.S. pulls our troops out? Do you trust the Afghans at all? From what a few friends have told me, they can be pretty damn shady. What's the most bad ass thing you saw/did in theater?
Just to go off of what BrianH said, I can answer questions about being a nondeploying pogue in the middle of nowhere. Different side of the military, if you ever wonder about what we do when we aren't being badasses.
The number of different jobs I've had is staggering. But if anyone wants to know about reasturant work, Burger King assistant manager, being a pencil pusher in the Air Force reserve, landscaping for a sleazy slum lord, pool boy, being a tire jockey for Discount Tire, or working in a mall clothing store feel free to hit me up.
If anyone has questions about being unemployed, fire them this way. I've travelled to a decent amount of the world and for me the hottest women are Uzbeks/Turkmen, Moldovans and Norse. The ugliest are British, Georgians and Kurds. Slavic girls are rightfully well regarded, but next time you're in a Slavic country, take a look at the 40 and 50 somethings and you'll change your mind about getting hitched to one. Are you sure that's the influence of Russia? Alexander the Great encouraged his soldiers to breed with the locals and really mixed up the gene pool in the places he conquered. To the point where around 10% of Syrians are white skinned and ginger haired. And before anyone asks, no, the gingers are not picked on at school over there. I guess if anyone has any travel questions then I may be able to field some of those.
Do you guys actually believe the crap you spout off on or are you just trying to stir up controversy to provoke callers?? I'd add Filipinas to the list....just the right mix of Asian/Spanish/Polynesian. Vietnamese too, for some reason they seem to age a lot better than other East/Southeast Asian nationalities. Afghan women CAN be very attractive....the key is you have to find ones that moved to the US or Europe at a very young age (like, before they were 10). The ones in Afghanistan live such a brutal life that they end up looking twice their age from about age 16 on. But they can look pretty good and even age well when they grow up in the West and actually have proper nutrition, proper health care, don't spend their whole lives doing manual labor, don't get married off to a 45-year-old uncle at age 9, don't shit out 10 future IED emplacers by age 22, etc. My first deployment one of the local interpreters on base was a guy born and raised in Kabul. He had blonde hair, blue eyes, was about 6'2 and built like Drago, and was in his mid-20s. It's possible that those genes had been passed down from Alexander's soldiers over the past 2 millenia....but I'm going with Occam's Razor on that one.