Visiting the White House

Part I: Roll Call

Almost every day at the National Science Bowl starts out with some sort of assembly. These are mainly to tell us what we will be doing that day and to give us directions, but also to call out people for doing things wrong, such as running around the halls after curfew (midnight). Part of these assemblies is also roll call, to make sure all sixty-four of the teams are present. Historically, there have been teams that announce their presence in a somewhat choreographed manner (the brown-nosers…), but this year roll call has been disappointingly bland. There’s not much more to say about the assemblies, though if someone decided to streak at one I’ll let you know (hasn’t happened yet, but you never know).

A large chunk of Friday’s morning meeting was a description of the optional scavenger hunt that the organizers of the competition planned to facilitate teams meeting each other. Each team received a digital camera (that we had to give back) in order to take pictures with other teams at specific landmarks and an obnoxious neon green sign with our number. The idea was to answer the questions on the scavenger hunt sheet and take pictures with as many teams as possible to get the extra “mingling points.” Albany was F-2. We didn’t get any mingling points, or any points for that matter. We figured that we knew how to look at museums and landmarks without assistance.

Part 2: Security Clearance

Friday’s official activity was a trip to the Smithsonian, but before hitting the museums the Albany team took a detour to the Executive Offices of the White House. Albany alum Sharon Hays, currently the Associate Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in the Executive Office of the President, invited her former teacher, Coach Peggy Carlock, and the rest of the team on an exclusive tour. The building is under high security, so we had to be cleared twice, IDed, scanned, and tagged upon entering the building.

Anyone who has taken art history would call the building, as Ian put it, “A conglomeration of every style period of architecture.” As we were told multiple times on the tour, the structure was built to impress. And impress it did. The rooms we looked at were quite ornate. We were mostly in the restored side of the building, which had been renovated, as we were told, to be able to withstand a bomb blast from 17th Street. There was still renovation going on, and repair had just finished from when the Vice President’s offices caught on fire. We even visited one room which had just been restored to look like it had in 1875 that the president hasn’t seen yet.

Dr. Hays and the other government officials who gave us the tour talked to us about their jobs and the huge bureaucracy that they have to deal with and add to. Note that this is the executive office which currently is highly conservative, so we were talking to Republicans (how someone from Albany became a part of this administration we have no clue). We behaved ourselves. It was a very neat experience, and we learned how much emphasis the government likes to put on security.

Part 3: A Day on the Mall

By the time we finished at the Executive Offices, most of the day had been taken up and we figured it was time for lunch. Everyone at the competition was given a lunch coupon for the Natural History Museum Cafe, so that’s where we went. It was museum food, nothing too exciting.

After lunch, we headed over to the Hirshhorn Museum of modern and contemporary art and saw a great cinema exhibit. Some of the displays were rather creepy, especially the projections of talking faces upon dolls strung up on the wall. Ian got really into the exhibit, George not so much, and Elise and I were somewhere in between. We didn’t have time for much else, so once we were done we headed back to the buses to be shipped back to the 4-H Center.

One Response

1. 5:48 PM on May 7th, 2008Someone:

   Congrats on going to the White House: Ground Zero for incompetentence during the Surplus of ‘01, squandering international sympathy post 9/11 for Iraq War, no WMDs, no exit plan, failure on Katrina, domestic spying, rigging the elections (twice), illegal war on Iraq, can’t pronounce “nuclear”, spends way too much time at the Crawford Ranch, has a speech impediment…then laughs about it, a former cheerleader, draft dodger, looks like a chimp, and choking on a pretzel.

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