Real Life

Now that I’m all caught up on my adventures, I thought it might be a good time to do a post about classes and interning, which are (supposedly) the reasons I’m here in the first place.

Classes are about the same as they were in the beginning. I really love my Parliament class, my professor is really charismatic and I’m really interested in the topic. I’m having a harder time being excited about my public policy class, but it’s manageable at least. We have two classes for an hour each on Monday, and no real work to do for them except for the papers we already handed in and the finals at the end of the program. I’m still not used to the system, since nothing is ever due it’s not easy to find the motivation to read textbooks for hours on end. After doing the essays I have a better idea of what the finals will be like, I definitely need to buckle down and start doing more of the class readings, even though none of them are mandatory.

My internship is getting progressively better. I work at the political consulting firm three days a week, and spend most days on the computer all day making spreadsheets, making follow-up calls for events and reading and summarizing political documents. It’s not the most fulfilling work, but I am learning a lot about the British political system. I’ve gotten to go to select committee meetings at Parliament a few times (being in Parliament never gets old) and I’ve been to a couple of events in the last few weeks. Today I went to a lecture at a think tank by David Milliband MP, the current foreign secretary and likely the next leader of the Labour party. It was really interesting, and it was a small audience so being there was a pretty big deal. Plus there were free cookies. :-)

Today I decided to change the topic of my dissertation, which is last minute and super scary, but I think it’s for the best. I was having a really hard time with research for the last topic I chose, and there is much more applicable information available for this new topic. I’m planning on writing about how the British government can engage young voters in the wake of very low young voter turnout in the last few elections. I’m really interested in youth engagement on any level, so hopefully that will be enough drive for me to bang out 40 pages in the next month or so. Eek!