Metro Mishaps and the Shutdown (Day 01)

Hello loyal readers of the William & Mary blogs!

I hope you all have had a wonderful start to 2019. My name is Caleb Rogers and I’m a junior at William & Mary excited to be taking the “Foreign Policy: International Development and Security” class in D.C. this Winter Break! Until January 9th, I will be serving as “blogger” and keeping you all up to date on our talks, tours, and such. I’ve been a Public Policy major since freshman year and, at 3:00AM a few months ago, decided to tack on a History major, as well. We’ll see if it’s possible to do in three semesters!

Initially, this class interested me because of its partial developmental focus, which is a fascinating topic I know little about. With the U.S. being a highly developed nation, what role does it play for still-developing countries? What role could it play?

We will also look at international relations from a security standpoint. Today, our class heard from David Auerswald, who is a strategic studies professor at the National War College. We learned about the National Security Council’s changing role since its conception. Prior to this, we chatted with Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a Brookings Institute Senior Fellow, about executive office turnover rates in different administrations.

As far as this post’s title goes, the Metro was pleasantly empty (read: not packed) this morning, per the shutdown perhaps. It probably took me as long to load funds onto the Metro card as it did to ride into Washington.

Tomorrow is our first full day. We will hear from practitioners in economic policy and D.C. lobbyists, before an exciting counterterrorism simulation on Friday morning. I’m looking forward to keeping y’all plugged in for the next few days! You can check back here every night for a new post.

– Caleb T. Rogers ’20

Six of our twenty-one students! L to R: Brooke, Madeleine, Sarah, Meredith, Ryan, Zach