Lindsey McCready [junior honors major in Political Science; Psychology, pre-law program, Class of 2019]: So I had first about Inside Washington actually before I came to Miami, when I was exploring the political science program and different opportunities. That was one of the first things I saw. It's a 10-week program; so you spend your first three weeks in DC exploring and meeting with different speakers that both one of the professors in the journalism department as well as a Miami alum, who is a Fox News executive producer, set up.

They're very fast paced. It is kind of a little shock because you get in on, I think it's a Saturday, and then you have stuff from that Saturday, every day, for three weeks non-stop. We were on like one of the Sunday morning news shows, which was really fun. We did a lot of — Face the Nation was what we were on. And then we just met with speakers — we usually have between, like, five and six speakers a day, and how those go, someone's in charge of doing the research that then they share with everyone else so they can learn about the speaker. We ask questions -- a lot of them are very interactive. So we typically do six one-hour sessions a day, all over the city, so we'll be running from like one side taking the metro to the clear opposite side, going from like the House to the White House, to anything in between.

After those initial three weeks, you are placed with an internship. So for the next seven weeks I was with Congressman [Warren] Davidson's office. But it varied based on everyone's individual interests, so we had some people on Capitol Hill, some people in media firms, some people doing journalism, some doing lobbying.

So I really wanted to be on Capitol Hill this summer, and it worked out that the representative for both my actual home in Springfield as well as Miami's is the same, because of the way the district's shaped. For the last seven weeks, I was placed with Congressman Warren Davidson's office. He's the representative for Ohio's eighth district.

Being in Inside Washington, I definitely got to see a different side of how policy's made. I spent a lot of time like attending briefings and doing policy research this summer, and it really gave me good insight into what it's like in DC, what our entire legal system's built on, and that is something I've definitely tried to bring back with me to campus through my work in Amicus Curiae, which is our pre-law society here.

[March 2018]