After the externs trickled into D.C., their sponsors scheduled some recreation before the work began.

Foshko's sponsor, legal recruiter Gelin, met her at the airport and promptly whisked her off to the National Gallery and then a movie.

Chen's host had told her they would take a bike ride after she arrived. Knowing her sponsor had graduated a few years back, Chen figured she would be able to handle the exertion. But soon she was huffing and puffing as Lourie took her on a tour of D.C. by bike.

"First we bike around the monuments. It's really flat and easy. Then we cross the state line into Virginia," Chen says.

At this point, Chen began to worry about what she had gotten herself into.

"I hadn't eaten anything all day, but I didn't want to seem whiny," she says.

Luckily for Chen, Lourie's bike seat broke and they had to stop before heading over to Mount Vernon. When she later calculated the length of their ride, Chen figured they had gone over 20 miles.

After her restful spring break tour, Chen says she will never underestimate Radcliffe women. When Lourie later invited Chen to join her on a run, Chen politely declined.

In her free time for the rest of the week, Chen concentrated on seeing tourist spots, including the Supreme Court, Library of Congress and museums.

Because of the program, though, Chen got to see the places most tourists are kept from. Her second sponsor, Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget Sylvia Mathews '87, took Chen on a tour of the West Wing of the White House.

One day when she was on her own, Chen faced the bane of every D.C. tourist--the Metro system.

At rush hour, Chen spent several minutes fumbling with a dollar bill that she could not make slide into the fare card machine.

"Everyone's getting impatient behind me and this girl, maybe four years-old, comes up to me and does it for me," Chen says.

As if that were not enough embarrassment, she proceeded to take the train in the wrong direction and became lost. A Metro employee had to take her to the right train and give her instructions.

Maybe tropical locales would not have presented such inner city challenges, but Ridlington says she would pick her Washington trip over Cancun any day.

"It's too hot there and [the externship] is a lot more rewarding than starting into space or watching TV," Ridlington says. "It's different from anything I do at school, and that's what I look for more than anything else in a vacation."