Break

So, as I said a couple posts ago, this past week was incredibly hectic. Now that I'm through with most of it and starting in on spring break, let me recap in a lengthy manner that only I will find interesting:

The most exciting thing was my interview at the Government Accountability Office on Wednesday. The interview itself lasted for an hour and a half or so, with 7 people sitting in from the Physical Infrastructure and Strategic Issues teams. I then went around with a couple of young staffers for a little while, and finished with talking to one of the leaders of the PI team. I thought it went pretty well on the whole.

They said they'd be making a decision in about a week, so I was pleasantly surprised when I got a call on Thursday morning from the staff manager saying they planned to offer me the internship! I'm really excited -- I think it'll be a very cool internship where I'll get exposed to a sophisticated and broad view of policy analysis. Plus, they do a lot of hiring through their internship program. A number of people from my program applied to the GAO, and Maura was also offered a position last week (on the Education and Workforce team). We'll be able to keep each other company on the train this summer, which should make the commute quite pleasant (it also doesn't hurt that I maintain a child-like enthusiasm for riding the train). Anyway, the internship will be about 16 weeks starting May 30, and the pay isn't bad either.

I also got called in for an interview for the Baltimore Mayoral Fellowship program, my second choice for the summer. Now I'm canceling it, since I prefer the GAO, but it's nice to know I had a shot at it. And in general, it's a big relief to know that my summer internship is squared away.


While I was getting all hyped up about the GAO interview, I managed to (barely) get all my work done this week. Perhaps the highlight of deadline-supercharged productivity was when I wrote the last 8 pages of an 11-page paper between getting out of class at noon and going to the class where the paper was due at 5:00. But now I go from having 7 classes to 4 classes, which is way more manageable, so I shouldn't be run ragged for the remainder of the semester.

I got word yesterday that my op-ed on Wikipedia will be in the Baltimore Sun on Sunday. That's pretty good, since the circulation is a lot higher Sunday. I asked them to include my email in the author tagline, so hopefully someone will email me what they think about it. I'd even like to hear from someone who vehemently disagrees. Anyway, since I'm leaving town tomorrow morning I'll be able to pick up a hard copy of the paper before I go, which will be nice to clip and file.

Due to some inept communication on my part, Erin thought I was going to visit this past week, not next week. And she's going to CA for a lumberjack tournament next week, so I'm not going to get a chance to visit her after all, which is a bummer. I'm still going to visit my parents, though, which should be nice.

Finally, I'm writing this post from the couch on my new MacBook Pro! It actually came on Monday, and through superhuman self-restraint, I managed not to open it until Thursday because I needed every spare moment to get all my work done. But this is the epitome of something that's exciting to me and not really interesting to anyone else, so I'll just say that it's really awesome -- I'm currently playing Ted Leo through the speakers in the living room via WiFi.