Special Counseling

This week marked the start of my summer internship at the Office of Special Counsel. There are many "special counsels" set up within the government, but this one is the most special. We investigate complaints about prohibited personnel practices within the executive branch of the government. 

That doesn't sound exciting. 

I'll try again. We investigate complaints from whistleblowers who reported fraud/abuse/illegality within their chain of command and were then punished or fired for that report. 

This is my desk. I have a desk and my own computer. And a badge. Very important to have a badge.

I enjoy the work so far. I'm working on real cases and I have a fun fellow intern and a very nice boss who has been giving me more responsibility and authority every day. After work I can take the bus halfway back home and work out at the gym (which I have not done all year but which I now am doing as part of a work-out-to-avoid-future-embarrassment routine).

In other news, Rupert and Harper have been having regular visits and aren't trying to kill each other anymore. They aren't quite friends yet, but they are certainly in a cold-war stage.

The Weekend of Exceptional Life Lessons

This past week has been very eventful. I will leave the MOST eventful stuff to Kelsey, though, as she has already summed up its events in this blogpost.

The day after my final exam was turned in I went on a walkabout. That is, I went outside (where I had not been in a while) and just walked about wherever I wanted to go. Everyone else was at work/school so I took a bus over to the Mall and started at the outdoor sculpture garden.

Contemplating modern art is always much more palatable when you can compare it to taking exams.

My main goal, though, was to get to the Air and Space Museum's new exhibit on time and navigation. Why? Because learning how clocks work is just about the most exciting thing in the world, especially after exams. 

And because I always love walking past the Apollo 11 Command Module right after the entrance.

The time and navigation exhibit was amazing. Whoever put it together really thought carefully about the progression of the exhibit and what sorts of multimedia should be present. It started with a brief explanation of ocean navigation before the 1500's and the very real dangers of just plain getting lost and having no idea how to get back home. You wouldn't think "accurate timekeeping" would be the answer to a navigation question, but it is, and this was presented fantastically well with an interactive game involving plotting a ship's location using a sextant a clock. 

You had to align the sextant with a certain star on the back wall and then the game showed you a PDF of an old star-chart where you could see the longitude given by the angle cross-referenced with the current time.

The exhibit also had a reasonably well-acted pictures in frames talking to each other (featuring an Apollo-era astronaut, a WWII-era pilot, a justifiably confused 1800's-era ship captain, a modern-day military navigator, and a very confused modern-day person who just stumbled into the center frame) in order to explain, again, the basics of how time is integral to navigation. There were examples of clocks from the very earliest pendulum designs all the way up to a cesium atomic clock, and with each new clock there was some sort of explanation about the increased navigational accuracy that the clock's invention allowed. 

I'm making clocks sound like fun, right? Right? 

I liked it so much that I forced Kelsey to come see it in the middle of one of our runs on Sunday. That was before her car got broken into. Speaking of which, we have a video of the guy who broke into Kelsey's car walking away with her purse. This is courtesy of the very nice nerdy couple with excellent surveillance technology.

Kelsey was moments away from screaming "enhance!" while living out her CSI dreams in this couple's apartment. 

Walking into a Buzz Cut?

Today, with the completion and turning in of one 40-page paper that I like and one 25-page paper that I hope earns forgiveness from my professor, I am finished with exams. As always, it has been the least fun part of the semester and I am so glad that I only have to do this two more times.

I start at the Office of Special Counsel on the 28th, and until then I'll be doing small projects for Street Law, Inc. and doing a bunch of paperwork.

I suppose I should explain the paperwork. Actually, it goes along with the "exciting news" I referenced in my last post. Actually, it goes all the way back to this post, when I mentioned an application that I had been working on since August. Actually, it goes back a bit further than that. I might make a post explaining more at some later date if and when this becomes official, but I will keep it short here.

For various reasons, I have been very interested in the JAG Corps since near the end of my 1L year when I was doing job research. JAG officers are lawyers in Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Coast Guard who prosecute and defend during a court martial, give operational legal advice on the law of war, help service members with various legal issues, etc.... For additional various reasons, out of the five different types of JAG I vastly preferred Navy.

Navy JAG does its hiring differently from everyone else. In fact, you can apply as a 2L. So that's what I did back in October. Predictably, I did not get in during that round. I was expecting that, because the Navy gets WAY more applications for JAG than it has positions available. For 2012 it was something like a 4% acceptance rate. This is the primary reason I didn't tell anyone about this before now.

Anyway, I went into 2L year trying to structure my course load to make the Navy like me, and I applied again in February. I found out on Friday, May 3rd that this application was accepted, which means that if I pass a medical exam and security check I will be a Navy JAG officer starting sometime after I pass the bar in 2014 (I suppose that assumes I'm going to pass the bar). This is exactly what I want to do and is my #1 choice for career out of law school. I'm very excited about it, but I'm also trying to not make a big deal out of it in case I don't pass the commissioning process for some reason.

If everything goes well, then to answer the question you haven't asked: yes, I will pretty much be Tom Cruise from A Few Good Men. But taller.

Passed the MPRE

I learned today that I'm ethical enough to take the Bar Exam in any state or territory of the United States. Looks like eschewing studying to work on a cookie truck is a solid life choice, after all. There has also been some other exciting news from the law front that I am not yet prepared to share in blog form but that has made this exam period considerably less stressful. I will write a longer post about that and what it means after exams are over (the 14th).

Until then, this is the reason I study at my place or the library rather than Kelsey's place during exam period:

It's Kels's computer, but the same applies to mine.

The More You Know

I'm studying for Corporations right now. Part of Corporations law is being able to understand basic accounting. This is great, since I took accounting in college and had a good accounting teacher. Also, I taught economics for a year, and sometimes understanding accounting requires an understanding of microeconomics. That's not really going to help me on the exam, but I would like to think that it will. 

At the very least, I have determined (during my week in the library basement) that this package of cookies is the most economically rational thing to purchase from the vending machine from both a caloric and volume standpoint.