Monday:

I’ve gotten the feeling that most TWC interns don’t really think about life outside their internship much before signing on to spend a semester down in DC (or up in DC, out in DC whatever – I’m from the northeast so its down for me, but I’ve gotten corrected several times since being here) so I decided that it might be a good idea to lay out some of the things that I wasn’t exactly expecting.  I don’t want that to come across in a bad way at all, I just want to try to take some time to explain a few of the things about this program that I had never really thought of before, or just hadn’t r

I guess my first clue was all the Facebook statuses and tweets about spring break late last week.  Maybe I should have figured it out when I noticed cherry blossoms beginning to bloom during my run on the National Mall last weekend.  Last Friday, my program advisor e-mailed me a midterm assessment form that my internship supervisor has to fill out within the next week.  But I guess it really hit me tonight in class when my professor handed out our take home midterms – we’re officially halfway through the semester.

So its been a little over a month since I first got to DC, and at this point I’d say I’ve adapted to life as a real-life working person.  I don’t really think I’ll ever be too eager to wake up at 7am 5 days a week, but at least I have found a temporary solution to early-morning exhaustion: cappuccinos.  I never wanted to be one of those people who needs a java jolt in the morning to function, but it’s really not that bad.

No doubt about that.  Waking up at 7:15 and working from 9 to 5:30 every day is worlds apart from “real college.”  If I was back at SJU, chances are I would be messing around in the library “doing homework” or out with my friends.  Instead, its not even 11:00 pm at night and I’m the last one up in my apartment.  Coming to DC has been a real wake-up call that a real world of suits and business meetings does exist, and in a little over a year it may very well become a reality for me. 

My name is Elyse and I’m from central New Jersey, about an hour outside of New York City.  I go to St.