I interned at the MIT Washington office where my major project was researching NASA's earth and planetary sciences space missions portfolio to create a living database to understand the current scientific, budgetary and political standing of each mission. Throughout the summer, I attended several Congressional hearings, markups and briefings summarizing important actions for a weekly legislative report, in addition to creating several memos on specific NASA missions and congressmen to brief visiting administrators and researchers. The breadth of direct interaction with our government branches truly gave me that first-hand look that I was looking for in my DC experience and allowed me to gain an enormous amount of information on current scientific and political issues that I would have not gotten thru any other means. The internship very much lived up to my expectations as it taught me that the best way I could make a contribution to Washington, as person interested in science engineering, was to obtain an advance science degree and later come back and put those much needed skills in practice.