When 6 a.m. cycles around every work day, teaching apprentice and junior Lauren McDonald is the first student bustling around the Hillsdale house in Washington D.C.
Built in 1900 and recently acquired by the college, it houses 11 other students: all participants of the Washington Hillsdale Internship Program.
As McDonald departs for her hour-long commute to the Washington Latin Public Charter School, House and Senate interns, think-tankers, and journalists alike begin their morning breakfast rituals.
“I am not awake if I don’t have my coffee,” said junior Ariel Rigdon, an intern for the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. “Coffee is a tradition.”
The three-story, mint-green brick house was dubbed “The Embassy” by the current WHIP class. Ian Swanson, a junior and intern for Nebraska Congressman Lee Terry, proposed the name.
“Embassies are exploratory,”Swanson said. “Ambassadors are there to learn more about the culture in a different country. And D.C. sure feels like a different country sometimes.”
The Embassy is conveniently located four blocks from Union Station and a mere two blocks from Hillsdale’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Citizenship and Constitutional Studies.
Junior Hayden Smith, an intern at FreedomWorks, said he is grateful to be living in Washington’s historic district; an opportunity he says would normally be “financially out of reach” for interns.
“The location is the best because you can walk to every cultural site in the area,” Smith said. “The dense city life made me appreciate walking. It is an older way of life and I’m nostalgic for that.”
WHIP students, or “whipsters,” have taken full advantage of D.C. culture, attending career networking events, lectures, museums, and historical sites. Last month, five students took an excursion to Woodrow Wilson’s home. Walking to the former president’s house, which is located on embassy row, students set foot on the sovereign territory of 22 nations including Mauritania, Turkey, and Togo.
“Where else but D.C.?” Swanson said.
There are advantages to living in the District, rather than simply visiting for the standard eighth-grade field trip or family vacation.
“I’ve tried to find places that most “tourists” neglect,” Swanson said. “For example the Postal Museum: it blew me away. I never thought in a million years this bankrupt organization would have a cool museum.”
Life in The Embassy bears differences and similarities to life at Hillsdale.
Junior Josiah Kollmeyer, an intern for Hillsdale’s own Rep. Tim Walberg (R., Mich.) described how “whipsters” are “closer than a dorm because the outside world is, in a way, hostile.”
Students are also taking measures to preserve the Hillsdale lifestyle in Washington D.C. Smith established a book club late last month.
The inaugural five members of the club are reading Leo Strauss’ “Natural Right and History” at the suggestion of politics faculty members.
“I wanted to read it because the issues I feel it deals with are perennially great questions of political philosophy,” Smith said.
The community fostered and cultivated by life in The Embassy sustains the Hillsdale students as they live in the Federal City. The Embassy, Smith mused, “keeps the Hillsdale spirit. I don’t feel orphaned from Hillsdale.”