Best reason ever to blow off finals

Our final exams begin in five days, but Iowa Caucus Project staff members and over a dozen other Drake University students won’t join our classmates in the library this weekend. We see our peers pouring over course notebooks and tapping away busily at laptops through the library’s windows, but this week, we’re working as ABC News interns in preparation for the Saturday evening’s Iowa Debate in Sheslow Auditorium at Drake in Des Moines, Iowa.

Junior Lauren Ehrler could be preparing for her presentation Monday, but instead, she’s preparing to be personal assistant to George Stephanopoulos.

Ehrler decided on Drake and Des Moines because she’d heard about the chances that could arise for students living and working in Des Moines around caucus season.

“I’d grown up watching George Stephanopoulos and Diane Sawyer on TV, so the tiniest opportunity that I would get to work with them solidified my decision to be at Drake,” she said.

Another junior, Luke Braland, said so far, he’s run a lot of cable, helped hardwire cameras and “moved a lot of things,” offering his help to anyone and everyone.

“You can only get some experience sitting in a classroom,” he said. “The best way to learn is through going through it—seeing how it happens, trying to make it happen and seeing how much work you have to put in to get your overall product.”

The job includes a lot of stop-and-go tasks, not to mention attempting to conquer the fiasco that is attempting to coordinate so many student schedules the week before final exams. It hasn’t been a completely frustration-free process. But I’ve been hard-pressed to find anyone involved who would rather be someplace else.

Senior Oliver Housman is scheduled to work around 10 hours a day while ABC is here, working in a variety of different ways. He got his start at 7 a.m. Wednesday.

“That was actually cool, just seeing all the stuff coming off the truck,” he said. “It was the beginning grunt stages of getting everything done.”

By the end of Wednesday, the familiar stage of Sheslow Auditorium had become host to seven podiums and huge LCD screens. I’d listened to an ABC producer explain what he saw as some of the major challenges facing journalism today. I’d listened in on a conference call with the ABC offices in New York.

This totally beats studying for finals.