From The Classroom I’d love to tell you that my attention to detail, hard work, and academic excellence have landed me all of my jobs after graduation. Since the speech during freshman orientation on the Honor Code still sticks with me, I won’t lie to you. While all of those are certainly qualities of a [...]

I was a jejuene twenty-five year old, home to help the family after Dad's heart attack, working at the waste-water treatment plant; and I was at this party with a casual enamorada whose girlfriend introduced me to her casual enamorado. It turned out that the guy was a 'political consultant,' or so he said — [...]

Politics is a challenging, exciting and rewarding profession. To succeed, one must have a combination of skills, including: 1) the ability to develop and communicate strong beliefs; 2) motivate volunteers and voters; 3) know when to compromise; and 4) a willingness to work long hours with little pay and little sleep for a candidate or [...]

During my time working on Capitol Hill, I heard many a recent graduate-turned-new-Capitol-Hill-staffer sigh in defeat and say something like this:  “Three months ago I was winning awards for my honors thesis in art history, and now I’m answering phones.”  If you suffer from this form of post-graduate malaise, take heart.  In the rough-and-tumble world [...]

Capitol Hill, specifically the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, are the centerpiece of Washington and our Federal government. W&L has an excellent Washington Term Program to introduce students to what goes on inside the Beltway. But securing a full-time job in Congress is often a tough venture. On graduation day 2005, I drove northeast [...]