Never underestimate the power that the nine-to-five work day can exert upon your daily routine; this is one of the many lessons that I have learned over the course of my first three weeks in Washington D.C., the place where politics meet reality.  It is a place where a small-town Midwesterner such as myself can easily fall victim to the overarching tones of rapidity and competitiveness.  It is a place where one can find that there exists a clash of understandings.  You see it everywhere; the Metro, the workplace, the restaurants, even the monuments.  From the outsiders’ perspective, there exists a great divide between how people engage with the world that we share. It starts as nuance, watching as some individuals rush down the left side of the escalator while others stand idly on the right, not daring to puncture the median threshold for fear of being rebuked by those […]

About a week into my internship with Lutheran Services in America was when I had my first “CAPS Moment”. I am not sure if this is a real term, but I think it best describes a moment in which a CAPS fellow feels a deep sense of purpose in their called location. I began my internship on a Wednesday and those first few days at Lutheran Services in America were spent with lots of cursory research. My fellowship has a goal of researching the trends of the nonprofit sector, so I therefore began much like I would have begun if this was a research project at Valpo. I read widely and broadly about the nonprofit sector and the organization’s role in it using websites and  journal articles. Even though this was not a university setting but the real world, due to the similar processes my mindset was one of intellectual curiosity, […]