Finding Housing

Besides the internship, the other major thing to find is housing. Here is the official description from the Washington Program about the housing situation. Professor Pitney also has a webpage on housing. On it he posts some great links to websites that will help you find housing. It's a great resource, and I wish I had been aware of it when I was looking for housing. This semester, Mike is staying at housing provided by the Heritage Foundation. To stay there, they make sure that you agree with their political opinions. Here's another website that I used to help find housing. It provides links to furnished housing.

Whether or not you decide to choose furnished housing is another issue that you have to face. "Furnished" can mean a lot of different things. This is something that they will address at on-campus orientation. It could mean anything from providing a table and chairs to our situation which had pretty much everything we needed from sheets for the beds to paper towels and dish soap. The other option is to get an unfurnished apartment in which case you would have to rent furniture. Nobody on this semester's program decided to go that route, and it would be significantly more difficult because you would have to worry about getting it all moved in.

Another consideration is location. This semester everybody but Ben is staying within the actual District. You can usually find cheaper housing in Virginia, but it is a little further from the CMC classroom and the Capitol/White House if you're thinking about working there. However, for people who are working at the Pentagon (Like Ben) it is more convenient.

You also have to consider how close your housing is to the metro in terms for getting to work. As Dr. Spalding articulated, you generally don't want to have to catch a bus to get to a subway station. When you're rushing in the morning that can be a little bit of a hassle. Our apartment is about 4-5 minutes from one subway station, and about 7-8 minutes from another one which has the line which goes to the Capitol. You should make sure your apartment is close to a metro station, and with the wonders of Google Maps, it is pretty easy to do that. You should also see how easy it is to get to the CMC office. In addition to classes, the CMC office is a nice place to go to when you need to do work for your research paper, do reading or work on any other applications you may have for the summer. The closest Metro stops for the office are Farragut West or Farragut North. The CMC office address is:

1101 17th Street NW
Suite 604
Washington, DC
20036

I'll put up a post about our apartment with some pictures in the future, and I'll try and convince the people living at other apartments to post something as well.