First Work Week in DC

So for most interns, the first day of work was on Monday. I was no exception. I started my internship at League of Women Voters on Monday at 10 am. Everyday I have worked at my site from 9 am to 5 pm, with a few exceptions (I will explain those later). For those of you who don’t know what this organization is, LWV is an American civic organization that was originally formed to help women take a larger role in public affairs after winning the right to vote. However, while it still has this mission, it now is also an organization that has male involvement, is officially nonpartisan, and educates voters on elections. These elections range from school board elections all the way to Presidential elections. These last few days have been very interesting. I work at a desk most of the day and have been working on a few different projects. These projects included calling up different branches of the organization (there are branches throughout the whole US) and making sure their information is up to date. Another project was looking up the websites and social medias for different people who announced they were running for different offices and determining if they are still actually running. Finally, I also have been looking into different cities to see if they have any elections this year. While 2019 is traditionally not an election year, a lot of cities have primaries or special elections for vacant seats and we cover all of those.

This work has been interesting. While I’m not always a huge fan to sit at a desk, I know this is only temporary since most local 2019 elections are done by March. Also, I am learning a lot and it has only been my first week. I am learning about local elections and the impact social media has on your platform and how you are represented in your race. These are things I knew about before on a basic level but now really see up close and personal.

Like I mentioned above, my work week has been a little different from what it normally will be. Part of the reason for that has been the weather. Since I have always lived in Wisconsin, the cold and the snow are a norm for me. I don’t think much about getting 2 or 3 inches of snow or having temps that are around 10 degrees or less. However, this is really different in DC. On Tuesday, I was told to leave work early because of the ‘inclement weather’. I could see from my office window that it was snowing but was not able to see how many inches DC actually got. When I got outside, I was shocked to see that no snow had actually gathered on the ground. By the time the snow hit the ground, it had all melted. However, the way people were talking about it who are from DC/ the surrounding area, you would have thought we just got a foot of snow. Also, I didn’t have to come into work until 12 pm the next day because of “the weather”. This difference between DC and Wisconsin was something I was not at all expecting. I knew Wisconsin had harsher winters but did not expect the difference to be this drastic. Also, it has been in the low teens to right above 0. Again, I know this is cold but this is downright freezing to people from the east cost. That is something new I am learning about this area.

Today, we had our day off from our internships. On Fridays, we have our LEAD classes (mentioned in the previous blog) and then I also went to the optional class about knowing your rights when being involved in a protest. One of the events I am most looking forward to while being in DC is going to protests about issues I am passionate about. In DC, there are an average of 1-3 protests a day. This informational session that TWC put on for us was giving us tips on what to expect if we had never been to a protest before and going over what most of them look like. Unlike the media can portray, our instructor (who has been to over 150 protests in the last 2 1/2 years) said they are generally full of energy but nonviolent. I can not wait to go to and experience my first real protest while being in DC and I will make sure to talk about it on this blog.

While I will eventually go into details about my night class I am taking as part of the TWC program and other programs I have become involved in through TWC (such as being one of 9 American students chosen to work with a group of Japanese students who are coming here), I will save those for another blog post since I want to have more than one week of experience with those before I talk about them. So, this is it for this week’s blog post about my DC experience. If you want me to talk about something particular or special, just let me know!