A lot comes with being in a new city. There’s anxiety and nerves, for sure, the “Am I crazy, moving to a city I don’t know to live in a house full of strangers?” There’s excitement, the feeling of new possibilities. But, most of all, there’s freedom. There is freedom in starting over. No one knows who you are, so no one expects you to be anything, to be anyone. Your DC experience gets to truly be what you make of it.
I interned at The Urban Institute, a non-partisan think tank, as the Executive Office Intern. Going in, I had three main tasks; help manage and communicate with the Board of Trustees, help with internal communication’s messaging, and assist the Equity Office with DEI initiatives. However, my role ended up expanding beyond that. I want to be a speechwriter, so I said yes to working on every piece of writing and communications work that was mentioned or sent my way.
As a result, I ended up working on a lot of rewarding projects. I helped research new Trustees to add to the Board, edited two videos for the company (yes, being a Cinema Studies major can actually be helpful in DC), helped organize and run a Zoom speaker event, and drafted LinkedIn posts for the President, just to name a few.
The SUNY program took us all over the city for our Friday classes. Some of the highlights were visiting the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, the Library of Congress, the DC Superior Court, the White House, and the U.S. Capitol. The class allows you to explore areas of the city you would have never thought about or had access to, and so you get to engage with people you otherwise would never meet.
What I learned at my internship and in class, and the work I did for them were all integral parts of the experience and fulfilled the goals that most people would hope to fulfill through participation in this program. And in an environment like DC or even college, it’s easy to par this summer down to a class and an internship, to plop the class on your transcript and the internship on your resume. Who you met, who you connected with, who you networked with, whose business cards you got, whose hands you shook.
But as I reflect on my time in DC, or when someone asks me how my summer was, the first things that come to mind are not the networking or the amazing things I got to work on.
It’s an early morning run to the Capitol, the sun slowly creeping up over the top of Freedom. It’s the Sunday morning trips to Goodwill. It’s the countless hours of nonsense in the house, it’s the last-minute runs to the corner store, it’s getting hopelessly lost on the Metro as we’re trying to get downtown to meet the rest of the group, it’s getting dinner with co-workers, it’s getting rained on after you’ve walked (or hobbled on a knee scooter) two miles to buy pie. As cheesy as it sounds, it’s the people and the memories you made with them.
It’s how, each time you did something new, you were brave. It’s being able to measure not only how you grew in number of connections on LinkedIn, but measuring how you grew. It’s how you’re now just a little bit stronger, a little bit kinder, and a little bit wiser.
So, in the wise words of Nike, just do it. Apply to this program. Get your internship. Hit the apply button on Indeed. Send the connection request on LinkedIn. Offer to watch hockey with your broken-footed housemate. Do any of the things, do all the things. Be anyone.