My first month in DC

We’ve been in DC for a month! The time has gone by so quickly. Over the past month I have worked at my internship, gone to class, attended policy salons and study tours, and taken the LSAT. I would like to take this opportunity to reflect upon the first month of my WAIP experience.

I am an intern at the Federal Judicial Center (FJC) in the Education Division in the Probation and Pretrial Services (P&P) group. The FJC is located in the Thurgood Marshall Federal Judiciary Building, pictured here.  I have been the only intern in my group since I started, but the second P&P intern starts tomorrow! The office is fairly quiet and I work independently on a lot of my projects, which has been pretty nice. Everyone in the office has been extremely kind and helpful so far! In the next week or two, the interns from the Education Division will all have the opportunity to attend the reading of an opinion at the SCOTUS, which I am very much looking forward to!

The study tours have all been great experiences thus far and have been one of the highlights of my first month in DC. So far, we have toured the Library of Congress, the DEA Museum, Lockheed Martin, the Newseum, the Pentagon, the National Archives, and the Air and Space Museum. I’ve really enjoyed all of the tours so far, but I especially enjoyed the National Archives. It was amazing to see the documents that we have learned about in school for so many years, documents that have shaped the country’s formation and history. One of my favorite details of the Archives tour was the silhouette of Abraham Lincoln in the painting devoted to the Declaration of Independence. It shows how the painter was able to subtly include his opinion about the importance of Abraham Lincoln in relation to a document and event that happened many years before his time.

Life in DC is more fast-paced than Columbus, and definitely much more so than Centerville. When I’m on OSU’s campus, I feel like I am always the person trying to walk around the people on the way to class so that I can walk faster (and make it to class on time), but here in DC, I feel like I’m in the exact opposite position. One piece of advice that everyone offers when you first move to DC is “walk left, stand right” referring to the acceptable ways to use the escalators in the metro stations, and I’ve even seen people get pushed out of the way for standing left because it is such a societal norm here. As our professor told us on the first day of class, “people in DC aren’t out of money; they’re out of time.” I think I’ve seen this play out in the first third of my summer here in DC just in the fact that it’s already a third of the way over! I’m looking forward to the rest of the summer and all of the experiences that will come with it. 

--Megan Hurd