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Back to Washington Homepage |
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What exactly was I doing there, anyway? |
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During the summer my internship was with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which was an experience and a half. Zbigniew Brezinski worked on my floor, for example, and I got to meet several people who Bush sent to Iraq to do a Reconstruction Assessment in June. I was actually working in the Islam Program, and most of my efforts during the summer were concentrated on setting up for and typing up transcripts from a convention we held on "Barriers to Modernization and Democratization in the Muslim World," where a lot of well-known scholars came to present papers they'd written on different aspects of the topic and to then discuss the different issues they'd brought up. It's kinda cool now when I look in my politics textbooks and see that I'm reading some of their writings for my classes. :-)
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Well, as most of you know, I'm a politics major, and so when I heard that Valpo had a program through which I could study in Washington, DC, I thought it sounded like a great opportunity.
Arranging my schedule so that I could spend both a semester in DC and a year in Germany was a bit of a trick, but thanks to Dean Franson's legendary skills, we worked everything out.
Finding an internship was another question. I had interviews and offers from both Amnesty International and Senator Dick Lugar (R-IN, Chairman of Senate Committee on Foreign Relations), and after much waivering, I decided on Amnesty.
As part of the program we had classes two evenings a week (mine were "Conflict and Compromise" and "Global Agenda"), Wednesdays were for field trips around DC (places like the Israeli and Saudi Arabian embassies, the State Department, Pentagon, etc), and the other four days of the week we had our internship.
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Iwo Jima, located right across the street from my condo. |
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One great thing about CSIS internships is that they have a program for interns called the "Abshire-Inamori Leadership Academy." Through this program there were several lectures held by senior staff members, and some of the interns were given a chance to give a 20-minute policy presentation to the other interns and at least 2 senior analysts. I signed up and was lucky enough to get a spot, and my presentation was on US-Saudi Arabian relations and what I thought the United States needed to do differenty. At the end of the presentation I fielded some pretty easy questions from the interns, then got torn to shreds by one of the experts, Dr. Anthony Cordesman. Considering he has written over 40 books on Saudi Arabia and about 1/3 of my sources were from his books, I was certainly in no position to argue with what he had to say!
Otherwise during the summer I searched for a job, worked on the presentation, studied in the Library of Congress (definitely a cool feeling :-)), and spent 2 1/2 weeks with my friend Markus, who came from Germany to visit me. |
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View from one stretch of my jogging path |
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At Amnesty I interned in the Country Coordinator (CoGroup) program, where I mostly went through resumes and cover letters to find people to fill the open country coordinator volunteer positions. During the semester I got do a lot of cool thngs like attend some protests, I got to see Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld (even got to shake hands with Rumsfeld), and of course just living in the city was an experience in and of itself. |
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