{"id":121,"date":"2025-10-24T11:32:59","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T15:32:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/?p=121"},"modified":"2025-12-18T13:29:19","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T18:29:19","slug":"from-wabash-to-washington-stephenson-institute-students-in-d-c","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/2025\/10\/24\/from-wabash-to-washington-stephenson-institute-students-in-d-c\/","title":{"rendered":"From Wabash to Washington: Stephenson Institute Students in D.C."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Arman Luthra ’26 and the American Enterprise Institute<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Washington, D.C., the stretch of Massachusetts Avenue from Dupont Circle to Chinatown has long been a street lined by public policy research institutes. Along with the Cato Institute, Brookings Institution, and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, you will also find the American Enterprise Institute<\/a>. Established in 1938, AEI has long been one of the established groups now known as \u201cthink tanks,\u201d with an emphasis on free enterprise and limited government. Today AEI remains a powerhouse, employing nearly 200 scholars, who focus on a wide variety of issues, including economics, foreign policy, and social welfare issues.<\/span><\/p>\n

Arman Luthra \u201926<\/b>, a Wabash computer science major, was hired as an AEI intern in summer 2025, where he focused on education policy. Spending his entire summer in D.C., and sponsored by the Stephenson Institute, Arman supported a research project that is gathering school leadership data from across the United States. What started as a goal to collect data from 10 percent of school districts has turned into a remarkable achievement. \u201cWe already have 70 percent of the data \u2026 and about 127,000 board minutes already aggregated,\u201d Arman reported. The goal is to analyze this data, which is currently stored in various formats and locations by the approximately 14,000 school districts nationwide. By collaborating with scholars from top universities, they plan to use semantic analysis of the conversations used in these minutes. \u201cIf they have all of that data coming in real time, they can easily see if there’s a certain keyword that’s being used more and more.\u201d Arman is excited for the project to continue. \u201cWe ended up making a novel technology that basically doesn’t exist,\u201d he said. \u201cI want to see this through.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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Albert Bernhardt, Diego Banuelos, and Hunter Otto at the State Department.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Three other Stephenson Institute students were also in D.C. over the summer, selected to participate in The Fund for American Studies<\/a>\u2019 (TFAS) undergraduate internship program. TFAS places students at policy-related organizations, including think tanks and non-profit associations, while also providing a biweekly evening seminar (American Economic Policy) and other networking events.<\/span><\/p>\n

Through TFAS,<\/span> Albert Bernhardt \u201926 <\/b>worked for Alliance for Innovation and Infrastructure, where he researched and wrote blog posts on related topics. His work included a piece published on \u201c<\/span>The Quantum Question: Can Our Infrastructure Keep Up?<\/span><\/a>” Albert also collaborated with his colleagues on larger projects: \u201cWe spent the last three or so weeks working on this huge project where we were trying to find out a modernized figure for the total amount of underground infrastructure as of 2025 \u2026 The figure hadn’t been updated since the 90s.\u201d Albert also appreciated the vibrant intellectual culture, seeing lunchtime lectures and enjoying \u201cplenty of networking opportunities.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

TFAS places students in more than just typical think tanks, including civil society organizations, such as the German American Heritage Foundation<\/a>. <\/span>Hunter Otto \u201927<\/b>, of German ancestry himself, was excited to be selected to work there in their Chinatown office. Key highlights of his time included work on the Amish, a research trip on early immigration to Jamestown, Virginia, and visits to multiple D.C. embassies\u2014including the missions of Austria, Poland, and Japan. The Austrian Embassy, Hunter explained, “was really cool because we got a tour of it, and there they informed us about Austrian immigration to America, how historically it happened.” His time at the Foundation deepened Hunter\u2019s appreciation for cultural pluralism and freedom of association within the U.S., especially through studying unique German-American communities like the Amish. He also completed a large research paper on the topic: \u201cI wrote the history of their faith from the Protestant Reformation all the way through today\u2014and how they managed their economy.”<\/span>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, <\/span>Diego Banuelos \u201927 <\/b>expressed interest in expanding his knowledge of foreign affairs, so he was thrilled to be placed by TFAS in covering the topic as an intern at the <\/span>Daily Caller<\/span><\/i>. In early June, Diego had just arrived in D.C. when Israel launched a surprise operation involving targets on numerous Iranian military, nuclear, and infrastructure sites. After over a week, the U.S. then intervened with airstrikes, codenamed \u201cOperation Midnight Hammer,\u201d on three Iranian nuclear facilities using \u201cbunker buster\u201d bombs. Without significant previous journalism experience, Diego was nonetheless learning fast. He was delighted to be bylined twice at the <\/span>Caller, <\/span><\/i>with one related to the Iran event, \u201c<\/span>Human Rights Orgs Tight-Lipped On Iranian Missile That Struck Israeli Hospital<\/span><\/a>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Washington, D.C., the stretch of Massachusetts Avenue from Dupont Circle to Chinatown has long been a street lined by public policy research institutes. Along with the Cato Institute, Brookings Institution, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":203,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":193,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internships"],"acf":[],"w_featured_image_url":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/49\/2025\/10\/arman3-1024x698.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/203"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":163,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121\/revisions\/163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/stephenson-institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}