Life Update

Written in the style of an e-mail to the Grandparents... because that's what it is.

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Overall, I'm having another good year, and am looking forward to both Christmas vacation and next semester.

The semester started out a little bit rocky for me. I ended up being assigned to the worst (half-)sophomore dorm on campus, in a single. It was far from the center of things and just not a great experience. With most of my friends living completely diagonally across campus, it was not a very good situation. I find more and more each year how much I like to be around people, and being isolated in a single room felt more like solitary confinement. Luckily(!) I was able to swap rooms with someone else less than a month into the semester. I ended up moving into what is probably the second nicest dorm on campus, with 3 roommates, and am enjoying life a lot more now. It's much closer to both classes and friends, and just generally is a much happier place.

The other thing that was causing me to be somewhat unhappy was how much free time I had. It sounds a little weird, but after the whirlwind of classes and internship that was last spring, just taking classes left me with so many empty hours that I felt a little bit useless. Luckily (again!) a spot opened up on the board of the main student organization I have been involved with on campus, the College Democrats. I beat out 25 other applicants for the position and got on the board about a month and a half ago. Especially in the run-up to the November election, we had a very busy event schedule and lots of interesting people circulating around. Since then it has slowed down a little bit, but continues to be a great experience. It's definitely filling up a ton of my free time and is serving as a good avenue to meet lots of new (politically-interested) people.

We are the largest student organization on campus, with 1,100 current members and an e-mail list of over 5,500 past and current students. Most weeks we have 3 or 4 events, with each attended by a good group of members. We try to have good variety in our programming, so sometimes it is just a speaker while other times it's an educational program or event geared toward advocating our policy preferences. We have had a lot of really interesting speakers thus far, and have some more big names planned for the spring. David Plouffe, Obama's 2008 campaign manager, has been our biggest so far, and most personally exciting, since he is pretty much who I want to be when I grow up. Others from the top of my head were Reps. Filner, Rahall, Conyers, and Israel; former VP Walter Mondale; Michael Moore; and former Secretary of Commerce and Transportation Norm Mineta, whose PAC ran a day and a half long campaign training seminar that I attended on campus. The airport we often fly out of in San Jose is named after him, so it was nice to get to meet him!

Classes are pretty bland this semester. I'm fulfilling my political thought distribution requirement, and philosophy has never been a passion of mine, so I am pretty much just counting down the days until that is done. My International Political Economy class is more interesting than I thought it would be, especially in light of our current crisis situation. Surveying and Sampling is taught as a discussion-based statistics course, which is pretty odd, but sometimes fascinating. My favorite class is probably my introductory journalism writing class, where I get to play with words and have fun writing. My professor was a founding partner at USA Today, wrote some books uncovering the New York mob, and now works at the Center for Public Integrity (a non-profit investigative research institution), and is absolutely full of stories. As I mentioned before, I am taking Chinese currently, and it is definitely not easy. Learning the characters and the tones to go with every syllable is pretty intense, but is going surprisingly well. That being said, I think this will be my only semester of the language. Just don't have a passion for it. 我不喜欢说中文。(I don't like to speak Chinese.)

I'm planning on having an internship again next semester, and have worked out a class schedule conducive to it. I'll be having class only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, pretty much all day, leaving the rest of the week open to internship work. I'm hoping that I can land a paid internship at a political consulting/vendor firm. My current top choice is with a company that researches and designs congressional and campaign websites, with a heavy dose of nerdy data analysis. Another potential option is with the firm that produced all of the direct mail pieces for Obama's 2008 campaign. If I can't secure a paying position, I'll probably end up somewhere like the Democratic Governors' Association (DGA) where I can be close to campaign management teams. I began sending out resumes and letters of interest this past week and am starting to get a slow trickle of responses, so hopefully something works out!

My classes next semester are nothing too special, aimed mostly at fulfilling distribution requirements and fitting into an internship-friendly schedule. I think Legislative Politics should be interesting, as well as Media Law, though.

Thanksgiving and Christmas are both fast approaching! Tickets home for the short Thanksgiving break were too expensive, so I am relaxing in DC and staying with [cousins] for the holiday. It will be very nice to get quality cooking into me and some good relaxation time. Although with a big paper due the Monday after, there may not be tons of that!

I hope that you are both doing well and aren't having to do too much to have an enjoyable Thanksgiving.

Claptrap

Haven't updated in a while... don't feel like writing something long.

Been to a bunch of really cool events recently and have met a bunch of interesting and/or famous people. College Dems is continuing to keep me busy. Classes are boring. I have a girlfriend. She's cute. My roommates are still kind of weird. I'm sad I am not coming home for Thanksgiving. Christmas break will be good. Internship hunting is monotonous and ongoing.

Love,