New Adventures

Well I suppose I'd better blog about the biggest news we've had since Mason was born: Gideon is graduating in April (walking in April, technically won't have his diploma until August)! He will have his Bachelor's in Actuarial Science. The last few months he's been interviewing like crazy with a few different companies for summer internships. He applied to literally about 25 different companies; every actuarial internship that was available for the summer in the US, you can bet Gideon applied for it. He must have spent hours and hours filling out applications.

He got turned down after a few interviews for a company called Mercer in their Seattle office. We were pretty bummed. Then over Christmas he interviewed for another company in Seattle/Portland. Got turned down again. One day he got a phone call from one of the random online jobs he'd applied for; the company, called Munich Re, was in Atlanta. We had never heard of the company, and it was so far away, so we kind of thought "eh, nothing's gonna come of it." But he interviewed on the phone a few times and they kept saying how impressed they were with him. They were also so great on the phone, friendly, personal, really treating Gideon like a person instead of just a number or a nobody. During this time, he was also interviewing via phone with Liberty Mutual, in Seattle. Eventually both companies decided to fly him out to do a final day of interviewing to make their decision. So he went to Atlanta one week, then a week later he flew to Seattle. After doing his research, we found out that the company in Atlanta, Munich Re (aka MARC LIFE), is the United States branch of the biggest Re-Insurance company in the world (Re-Insurance means that they insure commercial insurance companies. It's kind of complicated). They have some 50,000 employees world wide, and only about 260 employees in the US. Gideon's professor told him that it's pretty rare to get to work in re-insurance right out of school and that it was an awesome opportunity. Combine this with the fact that he was really impressed with how put together and nice everyone was when he went to interview, and we found ourselves crossing our fingers for Georgia (plus it's been so snowy here and Georgia is warm. I'm sure I'll be complaining about the humidity and heat in 6 months). And it ended up that they called and offered him the position with a near guarantee of a full time position afterwords, all before he even went to interview for Liberty Mutual. We were waiting to say anything in case he loved Liberty Mutual and got offered that position as well, but overall he was really put off by his experience in Seattle. The city itself is awesome, but the people and the opportunities couldn't hold a candle to the Atlanta job.

So, the point of this long boring story, is that we are headed to Atlanta, Georgia at the end of April. (April 29th is our exact move date). We are a little scared to be going so far away from our family and of course sad for the same reason. But, at the same time, we are beyond excited. The opportunity is an amazing one; we wouldn't head so far away unless it was. Plus Gideon's office is actually right outside of the city, making his commute so much more manageable than if he took a job in the middle of the city (most other actuary jobs are). So that's a plus. We are pretty stressed with the expenses of moving, trying to find a place to live without being able to go visit, and facing the 5 day drive to Atlanta. But really, we are so excited and we feel so blessed. We are excited to embark on a whole new exciting adventure! We've heard great things about the city we're moving to and we think it will be a great place for our family for at least the next few years. We really feel like we have been able to see the Lord's hand in the way everything has worked out, and we are just so grateful to have a good job and to be done with school.