Life After DC?

Last week one of the other interns at the NAFTA Desk of the Embassy finished her internship. She wasn’t a student with TWC but rather got her internship directly through her university so her schedule was a little different than the rest of ours…but really that’s beside the point. Basically after seeing her pack up her things and finish her last assignment, I realized how little time I have left. BUT it’s not the time thing that’s depressing me because I am excited to continue on from my DC experience (not that is hasn’t been amazing, but everyone seems to reach that stage with everything they do in life), what’s depressing me is worrying about how different things may be when I get back home to Calgary. I’m pretty worried that a lot of the stuff I’ve learned and want to talk/debate about will be completely uninteresting to my friends, and honestly they probably won’t know anything about it – which isn’t a bad thing because if I hadn’t come here I wouldn’t have known any more either…

Seriously though, the Mexican-US trucking dispute is probably not receiving much coverage in Canada (nor is it really in the US), and I’m pretty sure most of my friends from Latin America living in Calgary didn’t even notice the Summit of the Americas happened a few weeks ago. Again, it’s not anybody’s fault, but I guess I am just finding myself worrying that all the knowledge I’ve gained and insight from DC may end up fading away when I get back to Calgary due to a lack of continuous events and other interns who are always up for discussions. I guess the main thing for me will be making sure that I stay involved…the think tanks here in DC do post all of their events online via live newsfeed, and there are a few organizations in Calgary that I may be knocking on the doors of seeing how I can help. I’m also hoping to continue my civic engagement at the HI Hostel in Calgary so I’ll see how that goes.

I have a feeling that the TWC/internship/DC experience is overall a great one for every student, but that the real challenge tends to come afterwards. I think that probably half of the students go home and fall right back into their old routines and conversations….whereas the other half take what they’ve learned and keep trying to build on it. At this point I’m feeling quite motivated, so hopefully I can be in the second half.