A Friday Meet the Press
I realized that during my first internship, up on the hill in Senator Kohl’s office (something which seems forever ago and I’ll always have really fond memories of) I would write whenever I went into the office. It was valuable. I had posts about the interview and the special days and it was a complete experience. I want to try and keep that sort of thing up. Yes, I’m required to do a journal for this Prime Movers internship and this sort of supplement would be nice, but these posts are fun deviations to look back on.
Two of the interns are doing this internship for full credit, meaning a 3 credit class necessitating 15 hours a week. This means they work plenty of hours their school or schools and have their considerable travel time factored in. It’s certainly not as clear cut as a 9 to 6 internship, but they get it done. The problem is that DC public schools have really wacky schedules, and there are a lot of Fridays off as well as a lot of standardized testing days. These interns still need to get credit, so they’ll get end up doing stuff around the Prime Movers office or work on set up for events.
One of these events happened last Friday. These two interns were already working it, but the rest of the intern gang was invited to sit in. Four of the five of us ended up there and oh my god was it worth it.
Prime Movers knowingly schedules a lot on Friday because they know about schools having off and that the interns likely don’t have classes. This is when most of our brown bag lunches and meetings are. I’m looking forward to lunches with journalists and the meetings definitely served a good purpose, but this has by far been the best Friday at PMM yet.
PMM is partnered with the White House Correspondents Association for its second year. WHCA loves them, and why wouldn’t you? It’s a program right here in DC, getting kids in tough situations to look at journalism as a path forward and to follow it into college. Last year the director of the program was even at that great fancy incredibly exclusive dinner.
This Friday, three WH correspondents came in: Todd Gillman of the Dallas Morning News, a TIME reporter, and another reporter who I simply can’t recall. Three PMM schools came in and the kids were prepared with excellent questions. There weren’t many about actually being a journalist - most were about policy issues and the guys answered them deftly, giving a reporter’s perspective rather than their own. I got to sit in the back and watch it all unfold while most of the kids lined up behind the mikes and fired away.
At the end we (the interns) got to come down and take a few pictures with the kids and the journalists, not to mention have a great chat. My go to move these days is to bring up Ides of March, and while Mr. Gillman hadn’t seen it we still had a good talk.
I’m usually pretty protective of my Fridays. I like the luxury of being able to sit in my room or the library or somewhere else and hammer away at my work, without any planned events. But these are shaping up to be pretty great Fridays. It was a fantastic way to spend an hour and a half and I can’t believe I’m fortunate enough to be in this program and given these kinds of experiences.
