A new beginning

This post represents a new beginning in a couple of ways.

I am re-starting this blog with a new goal: To document my progress through the RCMP recruit selection process.

That also signifies another new beginning, career wise: I am sincerely hoping that within 6-12 months, if all goes well, I will be departing from my present employment and into the Mounted Police.

I have been working towards this for about 3 years now... I bought two pistols: the first, solely for the purpose of learning to shoot handguns better, and then I bought the second because it is a street legal version of the one the RCMP issues to it's constables. (mine has a slightly longer barrel than theirs to comply with Canadian law. The RCMP's are actually prohibited status because they are too short) I have been on a fitness program since the end of January to prepare for the PARE test (Physical Ability Requirements Evaluation)

Last night I attempted the first primary obstacle: The RCMP Police Aptitude Battery. I can't actually give any details of the exam because they are protected documents (there are actually only two officers in all of southern Alberta that are allowed to even see the exam!!) It is a very specialized personality profile/IQ test/thinking skills test/etc. The questions are TOUGH! From the RCMP recruiting web site: The test is designed to evaluate your potential aptitude for police work. The test measures seven skills that are essential in completing the duties of a police officer. These skills include Composition (Spelling, Grammar, and Vocabulary), Comprehension, Memory, Judgement, Observation, Logic, and Computation.

The vocabulary questions were nuts! They were asking for definitions of words that I am pretty sure were not even real words, and if they were real words, then I'll bet you a cookie that they weren't from english; or any other earth based language. I think they were Wookie, actually. The rest of the questions were, well, not easy, but more straight forward. I didn't do a lot of studying for this exam (we'll see if I bombed it!!) but the exam was very similar in feel to the Transport Canada exams that I have been writing for years as I went through my pilot training. Try a few of them on for size: http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/recruiting/prepen.pdf there are 21 practice questions in there that will have you thinking, and to their credit, the RCMP put a pretty fair representation of the exam in the study guide - some outfits sandbag their preparatoy guides so that people don't rip off their stuff, but not on this test.

The second half of the exam (the first exam was 114 multiple choice questions, the second was 108 opinion statements: Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Neutral, Agree, Strongly Agree) was over in a flash, asking you a whole bunch of inter related questions to try to test Conscientiousness. Which is a pretty important quality in a police officer.

I didn't do very much right as far as test taking goes... I was a little wound up stress wise, I barely arrived at my preplanned time (city rush hour traffic!!!) and I didn't have a healthy diet leading into the exam. And worst of all, I didn't realize this until I was almost to the hotel where they invigilated the exam... I had no coffee at all that day!! I don't usually drink coffee when I get up in the morning when I am going to the gym right away, otherwise, Juan Valdez is my pimp... I am useless without coffee (not that being caffinated improves much, but it's something, right?) I started getting a caffiene withdrawl headache and I started getting irritable with other drivers, and do you think I could find a Timmy's? In a city where there are more Tim Horton's outlets than there are fire hydrants, I could not locate a single one on my way to the hotel!! Nothing like making things hard on myself!! When I got out of there I stopped at not one but two Timmy's and got an Extra Large, one cream, two sugars and basically slammed them back for my drive back to Red Deer. If nothing else, it is for safety... I didn't get out of the exam until 9:30 and then I had an hour and forty minutes of driving to do. Made slightly longer by the fact I had to stop part way and "check the tires"... :)