The first step a candidate to our life should undertake is to contact the vocation director (Brother Ambrose) and arrange to make an initial visit. New Skete is intrinsically a monastic family, and thus candidates who are interested in our life need to develop a positive relationship with us through several visits. These visits are usually three days to a week in length (depending on individual circumstances), and help the candidate get to know the community and how we live. They also afford him the opportunity to speak with individual members and begin the process of discerning whether New Skete is the best place for them to grow and mature. 

          Once accepted by the community, the candidate enters the community for a pre-novitiate phase that can last up to six months. During this time the candidate lives and works with the community, is assigned a mentor, and receives initial formation. At the conclusion of this period, presuming positive discernment by both candidate and community, he is received as a novice. The novitiate is usually a two-three year trial period, in which the novice lives the monastic life with the community and learns its principles. This is a vital period of formation. At the conclusion of the novitiate, presuming the novice wishes to deepen his commitment to New Skete and the community agrees, he becomes a riasaphor, and assumes greater responsibilities in the community. This is a commitment of several years and concludes with monastic tonsure, when the monk makes life vows and becomes a professed monk.  By this profession, the monk renounces secular life for good in order to embrace the monastic virtues of obedience, poverty, chastity, piety, and stability: i.e., the evangelical life of work and prayer.