Putting That Civics Class to Good Use

With the Congressman Mark Foley scandal   still in the recesses of our not-so-distant memories, I am going to go out on a limb in suggesting an internship as a Congressional or Senate Page. Thinking about this in your Freshman year in high school is none too soon. Your grades need to be good and it would be a good idea to be doing some volunteer work in some sort of political arena. You may not have a burning desire to go into politics at this time but the summer or school year you spend as a page will give you great insight into how the government operates and will give you some great contacts for later use in your career....whatever that may be.

For more than 100 years, messengers known as Pages have served the United States Congress. Pages are appointed and sponsored by a member of Congress and must be high school juniors and at least sixteen years old. Pages serve principally as messengers. They carry documents between the House and Senate, Members’ offices, committees, and the Library of Congress. They also prepare the House and Senate chambers for each day’s business by distributing the Congressional Record and other documents related to the day’s agenda, assist in the cloakrooms and chambers, and when Congress is in session, sit near the dais where they may be summoned by Members for assistance. In the House, pages also raise and lower the flag on the roof of the Capitol.

For more information on the duties, salaries and requirements to be a page go to the US Senate Reference page .


Contact your Senator’s office   for more information on becoming a Senate Page.

And if you really want the inside scoop on what it's like to be a Congressional Page, the Congressional Page Association   website has some basic information on what it's like to be a Page. I most enjoyed reading the Page Memories   portion of the site. It made me wish I had known about this when I was in high school. I most definitely would have applied for it.

Pet Peeves

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Nursing School -- Getting in is half the battle

When I was going to school to get my teaching credential, I was a single mom with minimal financial resources. In order to conserve funds, I shared a house with another single mom who was going to nursing school. I have never seen anyone work as hard or be stressed out as much as she was. The nursing program was very competitive and everyone was trying to be at the top of their class. Yes, I worked hard as well; studying different methodologies and putting together lesson plans as a student teacher. But this woman was going through something far more intense than I could imagine. So if you are considering nursing as a profession, I would strongly recommend doing some informational interviews with new nurses (someone who is just a couple of years out of school), so that they can share their experiences, not only about their actual work as a nurse, but, also, their experience in nursing school.

U.S. nursing schools turned away 42,866 qualified applicants from baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs in 2006 due to an insufficient number of faculty, clinical sites, classroom space, clinical preceptors, and budget constraints.

There's no getting around it -- it's tough to get into a good nursing program. Perhaps you should first figure out if Nursing is the career you want to pursue. Chatterbean  has a short, online quiz you can take to see if, indeed, this is the career for you.

The most important thing is to make sure you actually want to be a nurse. Use the Internet to research as much as you can about this profession. Registered Nurses  are projected to create the second largest number of new jobs among all occupations! The US Dept of Labor has some excellent data on training, earnings, and occupational outlook that you should check out.


Johnson & Johnson  has a website that gives you an overview of nursing.

Another helpful site is collegeboard.com . In fact, they have information on LOTS of information on LOTS of occupations.

No matter what profession you are interested in, LEARN HOW TO USE THE INTERNET AND LEARN HOW TO RESEARCH! I can't stress this enough. Learn how to do Boolean searches. Try different key word searches. You might do a search on "nursing programs" and then, while reading, you find another term that may be more effective in your research so you do a search on "preparing for nursing school" or "nursing careers". Just doing a search on "nurse association" will give you a plethora of websites; from the American Nurses Association  to the Emergency Nurses Association . And when you find this information, make sure you follow up by sending emails to associations or hospitals or colleges and asking them for even more information.

Good luck!