An Overview

I suppose now would be a good time to explain exactly what I'm doing here in Washington, D.C.

The program I'm a part of is called the American Studies Program (ASP as we all so lovingly refer to it), which is a part of the CCCU's BestSemester Program. http://www.bestsemester.com/asp/

Follow the link to find all the details. In short, we (about 40 students from CCCU schools all over the country) are living together in an apartment building just 8 blocks from the Capitol. We take classes in this building every Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoon; the class structure is seminar/tutorial style, something new to most all of us. We finished up our second unit, Topics in National Affairs just this weekend. Our focus: Health Care Reform. Each of us was to pick a specific issue to examine (I chose SCHIP's reliability on the tobacco tax), conduct research (mostly by interviewing stakeholders around the city) and then write up a brief describing both sides of the argument and then your own opinion about what is the most just principle. Needless to say, it was a headache, but in the end we found ourselves chatting with some pretty important people and learning a lot about the biblical demands of justice. What's most interesting is that when you stick 40 political science/business/journalism people in the same building the learning/debating/discussing never quite ends. The classroom spans the whole experience, I'd say.

A large portion of our time here is spent at our internships. I spend Monday and Wednesday mornings and all day Tuesday and Thursday at my internship site: the National Center for Refugee and Immigrant Children (a section of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants). Check out the websites: http://www.refugees.org/ http://uscri.refugees.org/site/PageNavigator/Childrens%20Center/NCRIC_Home
To summarize, I am loving it and learning so much. I plan on expanding on the details of my work on another post.

With the delay of this blog as a prime example, the time here has been full. I'm very busy [which I love], but we also have plenty of time for fun...This is quite the spot for tourists after all! A few pictures to recap some of my time here. Just a taste:



We made it to a Brett Dennen concert!

I had a special visitor!!!

We eat a ton of good food! Here's some of us at the Banana Cafe with program vistors which included Dr. VanDer Werff!

There's always time to stop at the White House!

We plan to hit up every [free] museum! Here's us at the National Air and Space museum posing like the Wright brothers. :)