It’s been a little over a month and a half since I moved to DC, but I should probably take you back to the beginning.

After packing up four and a half years of college-life and saying goodbye to my roommates at the Worst Eastern, our charming home in sunny Oxford, OH, I headed back to Perry for a brief layover before coming to DC.

My dad, a master of “life Tetris,” managed to fit all of my things into our SUV plus a cozy nook for my mom in the back seat next to a precariously perched pile of luggage. Happy to unload the car and restore it to its original, spacious glory, we checked into WISH Woodley Park, the intern-housing where I have been living this semester.

“Hi, I’m Chelsea with the Miami University Inside Washington Program”

“Oh yes, sign in here”

Great, this is so easy.

I followed the desk clerk down the hall donning my UNC Tarheels hat eager to see my new apartment. Since I had assumed I would be living with the four other girls in my program who hadn’t moved in yet, you can imagine my surprise when I walked into a room already filled with someone else’s stuff.

“Did the other girls from Miami already move in?” I asked.

“No, you live with Duke” she pulled out her list of room assignments, “See, Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke, Miami.”

Awesome.

Luckily my roommates and I have been able to look past our difference and get along (as long as UNC and Duke aren’t playing each other).

The program got started right away and we spent the first five weeks running (actually running in some cases) around the city- and getting lost on more than one occasion- meeting congressmen, media players, lobbyists… you name it. Unfortunately, thanks to our disclaimer…

“We want this discussion to be frank open and free-wheeling, so we would like it to be off the record- for you and for us. We will not blog, tweet, or otherwise post online about the content of this meeting and we ask that you do the same.”

… I’ll have to share the details in person. But, to name a few, we had the chance to meet Rep. Paul Ryan, Senators Sherrod Brown and Rob Portman, Bret Baier from FOX News, and C-SPAN co-founder Brian Lamb.

Now that we’ve finished that portion of the semester I am interning at a national non-profit that advocates for rape victims until May.

So far, so good.