Geez! It's been a while.

Let's recap. The past week at work was busy as usual. I'm trying to take things week by week; using the logic that if I have a bad day, I can just shrug it off and move on.

In our seminar class Doug was talking about different stages many interns go through. First stage is nervousness/anxiety, followed by disillusionment, then "competence", then the final stage where you look back on it all. Sometimes I get disillusioned at work, wondering if the work I'm doing is really all that important. But I feel fairly competent as well--I've gotten good at talking to the press when they call my line, and I feel like I'm starting to develop a niche in the office.

I worked on a variety of tasks this week. The guy next to me, Adam Elkington, works with Organizing for America. He frequently gives me a lot of projects that involve looking up contact information for media outlets. The projects are tedious, but I feel motivated because I want to help out the cause in any way I can. I've also had to call up media outlets and "pitch" events, i.e. tell a reporter that OFA is having a huge event in your city, you should really want to cover it. I'm still taking notes on the gibbs press briefing, and apparently I do a pretty good job (see last entry). Occasionally, people will around me will ask me to clip articles. I had to like 25 clips in 90 minutes (not easy) for an asst. press secretary who sits near me. On top of all that, I have to do the Rapid Response Digest--a compilation of all the Press Releases that gets sent to the White House. In summation, I do whatever people tell me to do. And that encompasses quite a bit, adding up to a lot of work.

Thursday was of course the HC Summit. Feel free to read what I thought about it on the Megaphone Website. I watched it the whole, but was disappointed I didn't have any projects invovling it. New media and Comm merged for the day, so the Comm interns got pushed into a corner office in New Media. New Media is a cool dept, and I enjoyed working on some of their projects...but I wish I could have been in the comm office during the summit. Oh well. Rt now, I really hope HC reform gets passed soon, just to see everyone's reaction. That will be crazy!!!


More soon,

Tim