First Two Days of This Week

One additional note from the previous blog. If Saint Matthew's Cathedral sounds familiar, it is because that is where Pope John Paul II presided over one of his Mass's while he visited the United States in 1979, it is the Cathedral where Chief Justice William Rhenquist's funeral was held, and the place where John Kennedy's Solemn Requiem Mass was held before his body was laid to rest at Arlington. His son gave his famous salute to his father on the steps of the Cathedral.

My last two days of work have been much better than before. Mostly because of the fact that my workload has gone down slightly. On Monday I put the finishing touches and made final corrections on the immigration research summary of dozens of congressional candidates who are running as challengers this November. By the end of the day no one had anything for me to do so I was able to spend the last 45 minutes reading the local Washington newspapers and keep up with the latest news inside the Beltway.

Today I became familiar with an online system that The Raben Group uses to keep contact information about various people who work in various sectors of the media. For example, if I typed in a certain TV Show "NBC Nightly News" I would come up with some of the producers and other people who work behind the scenes of the show along with their contact information. Some of the information would be older and possibly out of date but that was not my concern. All I had to do was play with the system an become familiar with how to look for information on the website. Unfortunately, I may need more time to learn about it. My supervisor has told me that she can give me a more descriptive review of the system in the next few days. An interesting moment during my day was when my supervisor thought of certain issues  regarding immigration because I will probably work on a project that has to do with MALDEF or another Hispanic group that is usually more lenient on immigration issues. I gave her my viewpoint and the reasons for it and she was very receptive about it. She just wanted to make sure that I was doing something that I was not ideologically against.

Last night, journalist Richard Wolffe stopped by the UC Center while I was able to get 2nd row seats and able to get two slices of pizza instead of the usual number of one that I have gotten at past guest discussions. Wolffe talked about his experience with working on his book and the access in the White House he received during the first year and a half of the Obama Administration. Some of the highlights of what he said was that Democrats will hold the Senate, the House will likely have one of the parties have a small majority after the election, that you should not enter journalism unless it is all you want to do once you graduate, and that drinking was one of several ways to get passed the uneasiness that you may feel when giving an interview like he does on MSNBC shows like "Countdown with Keith Olbermann." Wolffe was very good with questions from the audience