From my aisle seat, I was well positioned to access the lecture microphone. Just beyond it stood Hillary Clinton. I did not hesitate to apply β and neither did 1, other students. My application essays were impassioned. I had imagined that spending two hours each week with a former senator, secretary of state, first lady and presidential nominee would embolden me in new ways.
Unfortunately, my idealistic hopes got the best of me. On my first day, I expected to enter a classroom with 30 other students, which would be typical of classes in my program. Instead, I approached a swarm of several hundred.
Next to them was a sea of cameras belonging to journalists from various major outlets. Just to their right, I spotted Secret Service personnel whispering into their radios. It was only a. Perhaps the enormous class size was to be expected. It was, arguably, an equitable decision made to meet the high demand from students across a diversity of programs, all of whom hoped to learn from the same distinguished political figure.
Unfortunately, our shared enthusiasm was leveraged to what felt like the detriment of our own learning experience. Every Wednesday for 12 consecutive weeks, I sacrificed my lunch break to queue alongside equally eager students for the chance at scoring a front-row seat. On our first day of class, after making it past the Secret Service agents, we settled in for a much-anticipated two hours with the onetime presidential nominee. But the class abruptly ended half an hour early β and continued to do so every week.
O nly a handful of students were given time to ask their prepared questions. Why did we lose a quarter of our scheduled class time? The crew filming each session needed time to disassemble their equipment. Together in class and on tape, we acted much like an audience at a late-night talk show, distracted by the cameras and yet immersed in the vanity of the production. We followed an unspoken script where we were both active and passive at once β expected to laugh at certain anecdotes, but not encouraged to raise our hands.
