Nathan Dickerson is an intern this summer at Mobilizing America's Youth in Washington DC. He is a student at the University of Kentucky and is originally from Spotsville, Kentucky.
A Higher Education in the Capital.
By Nathan Dickerson, University of Kentucky
Thursday July 6, 2006
My parents never encouraged me to keep up the family farm in Kentucky. To make up for what a small farm income couldn’t cover, my dad worked as a firefighter and an EMT while my mom worked at a day care center. They hoped for a less scattered lifestyle for me. When I was in my early teens, the plan was for me to go to ITT Technical Institute in Indiana after high school. My family realized as I got older, however, that I should aim for a college education. With respectable test scores and generous scholarships, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the University of Kentucky as a first-generation college student. Yet I quickly discovered that to keep pace within the educational arms race, I would need a host of other expensive educational accessories. Having internalized this ethos, I find myself with the quintessential summer internship in the nation’s capital.
I’m experiencing a bit of social vertigo as I look back at my days on the farm with technical school ambitions, especially now that I’m spending my summer as an intern in Washington, D.C. During my first bewildered week inside the Beltway, I kept the classic Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime” on repeat. There were certainly a few times when I wondered, “Just how did I get here?” Like many American college students, I had left the sciences in search of a more satisfying exploration of the liberal arts. I made this switch knowing that I would have minimal debt from my undergraduate education and understanding that to apply liberal arts skills in the “real world,” I would either have to work assertively to join an unfamiliar class of knowledge workers or resort to serving lattes. I can certainly sympathize with the popular disdain directed at liberal arts students; because of the unclear career prospects a liberal arts education provides, it sometimes only seems financially pragmatic for those who have the social connections to be able to use it.
To build such connections, I applied for The Washington Center, a program that affiliates with multiple universities to connect their students to D.C. internships, adding some structure and academic accountability to the experience. I felt a bit sheepish for enrolling in a program that would arrange an internship for me, feeling as though it was the equivalent of an overpriced test prep course when, with the proper discipline, I could have just gone to the library and studied. Yet in the midst of a snowballing workload at the end of last semester, I realized that micromanaging applications and housing in a city I had only spent two days in last summer was outside my scope of capability. Thanks to the stipends I had saved from the Gaines Fellowship, assistance from my parents, and scholarships that removed the pressure of debt, I have been able to afford access to the “experiential learning” that is a prerequisite for a career in D.C.’s intellectual culture. (That would be an unpaid internship to the unacquainted.)
Now that I am in Washington and meeting other interns, I’m finding that The Washington Center is not an anomaly and many programs orchestrate internship placements for students who can afford this lifestyle. I had no idea summer intern employment had become so institutionalized, and even after being here for a month, I still feel embarrassingly naïve. I didn’t realize how much access interns have. For example, during the first few weeks, my internship supervisor asked me to attend the “Reverse the Raid on Student Aid” rally with Nancy Pelosi and other leading House Democrats. I arrived dressed similarly to the camera crew, not realizing the well-heeled atmosphere of the event. Everyone else wore business attire. I didn’t know rallies were so formal, and I didn’t think the HR (House of Representatives) room designation meant the rally was actually going to be inside the U.S. Capitol.
Because of my personal experiences, I’ve always been concerned about the accessibility of higher education, which led me to work for a nonprofit focused on lowering student debt through grassroots advocacy. The internship has not only helped me develop a more sophisticated understanding of student debt policy, but has been constructive in helping me understand the D.C. marketplace of ideas. Leading up to the July 1 interest rate increase for federal student loans, my first month in Washington saw me attending weekly meetings at the Campaign for America’s Future on behalf of my nonprofit. These meetings helped me appreciate the “inside the Beltway” rhetoric that is such a turn-off to many Americans. I began to notice the importance of job titles at these student debt meetings. Introductions in D.C., even socially, are a binary of name and occupation, as if the former simply cannot exist without the latter. This formality was at first counterintuitive, but I find myself using it naturally now. And my new vocabulary extends to the way I speak about politics. I’ve learned how narratives, messaging, scare tactics, and other political communication strategies can be used to disseminate information and cultivate activism. With the abundance of intricate policy ideas swirling around D.C., I can understand why advocacy organizations must employ such mechanisms to make policy accessible for those outside the Beltway.
Cities have always struck me as incubators of ideas, and this observation holds especially true for Washington, with its neoclassical architecture and plethora of think tanks. I love it here, and not just because think tanks provide the total package for knowledge-hungry interns with countless seminars and free food. Despite my efforts to soak up knowledge, I’m still not confident that I understand how this city works. Sometimes I feel as though everyone here spends their time writing political blogs for an audience of 12 friends while living off of a trust fund. But my outlook rapidly shifts when I walk into McDonald’s at 3 a.m. and realize that 24/7 knowledge workers depend on someone else to put in those same hours for minimum wage. This is especially disturbing to me because I feel that luck is significantly responsible for putting me on the other side of the counter.
Herein lies the crux of my dissatisfaction with the D.C. internship experience. I love the vantage point I have here in D.C. If I can continue to hover in this political knowledge culture, I may find a real use for the critical thinking skills I’ve gained from my liberal arts education. Yet I must approach this experience with cautious enthusiasm. I, for one, am unable to shake off feelings of a creeping disconnect between my lifestyle here and my lifestyle at home just a few years ago. This disconnect is echoed in the polarization I see between knowledge and service workers in D.C’s postindustrial economy, the disparity in wealth between neighborhoods like Georgetown and the Southeast quadrant of the city, and the distance between informed Washington elites versus average Americans. I gawk at the potency of insider knowledge and the way education stratifies people. From here, the hierarchies described by conservative thinkers such as Irving Kristol and Leo Strauss appear to be very real, indeed. Don’t get me wrong, I am glad to have a front row seat to watch how the world actually works. I just wish this sort of understanding were available to everyone.
Nathan's article can also be found at
http://campusprogress.org/features/989/interning-your-life-around
