No longer a Padawan, but a Jedi Master

While I won’t stoop to the level of my husband who claims he will make everyone call him “Master Chase” once he’s completed his degree (brace yourselves – he finishes in a couple of months!), I will stoop to the level of shamelessly detailing the events of my class and my graduation weekend on my blog. The next few blog posts will be about my class, my academic program, my graduation weekend celebrations, and some of what I’ve learned from my fellow classmates. I feel at the outset of writing that these blog posts will likely be a bit nostalgic and as self-indulgent as blog posts can get, so brace yourself. Here goes…

There were 16 students in my Master’s in American Government program at Georgetown, and over the last 11 months we’ve gotten to know each other pretty well. As individuals highly interested in politics, you can imagine we all held the proverbial cards of our personal political persuasions rather close to the chest. I remember feeling when I met my classmates for the first time like I had more control over things if I knew what political persuasion others were, but didn’t tell them what my own political leanings. Now we are all capable (and many of us have) of placing each of our classmates on the spectrum of political persuasion from super-conservative to extremely liberal, staunch Republican to left even of the Democratic party, yea even socialist.

I feel particularly grateful that my class was so widely diverse. I came here to learn about and from people NOT like me, an experience I didn’t get or at least didn’t get much during my undergrad. In this MA program, we were all very different with very different belief systems, values, ideologies, and political persuasions, but we all managed to stay friends while debating, arguing, and learning from each other.

So who are the 16 students in the class you might wonder? Well, here’s a picture of our class that Dr. Lengle took on the last day of class this July. I give you the Georgetown M.A. in American Government Class of 2010:

The three front and center are: Rebecca, Alix, and Tiffany

And starting from the far left: Meg, Cabell, Isaac, Matt, Robb, Kevin, Bryan, Paul, John, Sarah, Steph, Jay, and Dan

More to come about all of us later...

(Jay, if you read this, note the proper centering of the picture. :) )