When the convention is a classroom

Many professors view the opportunity as a chance for students to network.

Eugene Alpert, who started the Washington Center's convention series, tells the story of one student, who, at the 2000 Republican convention, was assigned the none-too-coveted task of securing the presidential nominees' restroom. George W. Bush passed his station daily, and by the end of the convention, the student had been offered a position as part of the president-to-be's advance team.

Boston University (BU) recently gave 67 students from photojournalism, political reporting, design, and multimedia convention courses the chance to participate in a mock press conference.

One of those students, Jessica Silvestro, earned her psychology degree from BU this year. She says she's not considering a career in politics, but photography does interest her, and she hopes the convention will give her "a truer sense of what it's like to be a photojournalist."

Others who take these courses are diehard political junkies.

Some students, according to Gregory Payne, a political communication professor at Emerson College in Boston, "go from one of these practical experiences to the next."

Twelve students are enrolled in the convention course that he and a journalism professor are teaching this summer. Some also participated in a presidential campaign course in the fall. And a few will attend the inauguration come January.

Professor Payne calls it "the perpetual endless campaign." For "people with a passion for politics, life is politics, everything is political," he says. "Aristotle said that."

As a young Republican at the University of Illinois in 1968, a professor told Payne's political science class to attend an event outside the classroom. Payne chose a rally in Indiana for Democratic presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy, an experience that he says, "changed my political landscape." He left the speech a Democrat.

"What I want to do in my teaching," he says, "is forge the same hands-on, head-on approach ... that I had in that class."

Professors say it's not uncommon for students to switch sides after closely examining parties and politicians. And "spirited debates" do ensue.

This year, Professor Alpert of the Washington Center says he has students who, in reaction to the 2000 election, "are self-described angry 18-year-olds." For the most part, though, professors say students allied with one party don't seem troubled by attending the other party's convention.

Michael Cappetta, a 14-year-old who's been reporting for Scholastic since October, refuses to reveal what candidate he would vote for - if he were of age.

"I think you know and I know that we're not supposed to share our opinion," he says. Michael, who lives in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, worries that identifying with a party might affect the way his young readers perceive the stories he has written on everything from a Cleveland appearance by Democrats John Kerry and John Edwards to a visit by President Bush.

Lauren Gentile, another Scholastic reporter from Clinton Township, Mich., has produced 20 stories. The night before the 13-year-old's first assignment, a Roseville, Mich., event for former Vermont governor Howard Dean, she didn't sleep at all. In the morning, Lauren said to her brother, "You know, this is going to be one of the best experiences of my life."

Later that day, she was granted an interview with Dean.

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