What's your most memorable internship? Were you just hanging around getting coffee, or were you in the thick of things?
Well for weeks now, college students from all over the country have been here in Cleveland as working as interns for the RNC.
Newchannel5’s Lauren Wilson caught up with one today and got a little insight on what exactly they’ll be doing while the GOP is in town.
Born and raised in Cleveland Heights, when Emma Vaughn heard the RNC would be in her hometown, she jumped at the opportunity.
“I always knew that I wanted to be apart of it. Cleveland is never like a centralized location and so it was just like my worlds colliding and I knew I had to take the opportunity,” she said.
Studying media relations and politics at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore, she tells me she's always been a lover of history and government.
“I’ve learned so much about the importance conventions have for the political process…this is just a whole different side of the political process that I never thought I would ever get a chance to work on.”
She's just one of the three dozen interns the convention alone has brought in for an experience they’ll never forget.
“They’re going to be doing stuff that other interns around the country simply aren’t doing,” said Dave O’Neil, Deputy Press Secretary for the RNC here in Cleveland.
Since the middle of May, interns have been working close to 16 hour days doing anything from researching to making contacts, working security, and managing press conferences.
“I never really worked with excel that much, and now I’m working with it alot, but I love it” Vaughn said.
“On the day they started it wasn’t like another internship where we show them around the office, and we take them to lunch. No they were doing tasks,” O’Neil explained.
And when the week finally arrives, there will even be interns from Baldwin Wallace University at Tri-C, who will actually get to go around hobnobbing with the delegates.
“Our real hardcore republican partisan students, they’ll be meeting and mixing with all those kinds of people throughout the week of the republican convention,” explained Tom Sutton, Politics Professor at Baldwin Wallace University.
As for Vaughn, she just hopes she can get close enough to the action, to rub elbows with one particular person.
“Um, maybe Paul Ryan,” she said. “I met him before, but just to shake his hand one more time. It’s a great experience and I’m going to remember it forever.”
Unlike other interns, Vaughn is actually not receiving any college credit, she told me she just wanted to do it for the experience.
Some of the interns from Baldwin Wallace will arrive in a week to start training, other will join them the week of the convention…just in time to ride along with the delegates.
