January 14, 2012

I just finished my first full week of work and I can tell that this internship is going to make me grow as a person in so many ways as well as teaching me so much about congress. Over the past week I had the chance to hang out with fellow FSC political science major Charlotte Garraway and some of her friends from the Washington Center program. We had the opportunity to dine at a restaurant that was featured on the hit Travel Channel show "Man vs Food." The name of the place is "Ben's Chili Bowl" and it is more of a small chili dog diner, but I can see why they featured it because it was phenomenal. This week I also went through capitol tour training and gave my first tour on friday to a constituent from the district. Over the past week I have met some more interns around the hill and began to realize that these are the people that will be running this country along side of me one day. Today one of my roommates, Charles Hussey from Mississippi State who is interning in Congressman Nunnley's office from the 1st district in Mississippi, and I went to explore some more parts of the city that we haven't been to yet. We walked about a mile out of the way to the Eastern Market which is sort of like a farmers and fresh food market that is open every weekend as well as going another mile out of the way from that to Union Station which is a mall and a train station all in one. On Friday right after the tour I gave I had the chance to Skype in with the Parties and Interests political science class taught by Dr. Anderson and was able to give them some insight on what is going on up here and what I've been up to. They asked some questions that were near impossible for me to answer since it was my first full week of the internship and we are out of session so I have not been able to learn much of Congressman Ross's specific policies, but thankfully the people in the office were able to jump in and assist me in answering their questions about Congress and Dennis Ross. As you may have noticed in these blogs I tend to jump around from thought to thought and have no real flow to it so please just bear with me. I will also be posting on the blog every couple days so be sure to check it a couple times a week to see what's going on, Until then, though, I hope you all enjoy it and have a wonderful weekend.
Thank you and God bless,

Gage Nicholas