“Incredible” was uttered several times by Sarah Onken while talking about participating in a college program in which she spent a semester in the nation’s capital.

Each year, 10 to 20 Hillsdale College students live and work in Washington, D.C., as part of the Washington-Hillsdale Internship Program.

During the day, they intern for a variety of institutes, including the White House, congressional offices and committees, think-tanks, media and news outlets, national security agencies, lobbying firms, international trade organizations and private sector companies.

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Then at night, they take college-credit classes.

Onken, a Brownstown native and 2012 Trinity Lutheran High School graduate, worked for the Heritage Foundation and took Constitutional history and American literature classes. She was one of 15 Hillsdale students who spent the spring semester living in four apartments owned by Hillsdale in Washington, D.C.

“It has certainly opened up career opportunities for me after school,” said Onken, who will be a senior at the independent liberal arts college in southern Michigan in the fall.

“I would really like to go to graduate school after I graduate,” she said. “But after that, jobs in D.C. are much easier to get when you have a higher degree, so it has shown me other lines of work that I could possibly do with my future.”

Several years ago, when she was researching colleges, Onken found information about WHIP on Hillsdale’s website. That was one of the reasons she chose to continue her education there.

The program is open to any class and any major. Onken is double-majoring in politics and math.

“Part of the reason was to see if I actually wanted to work (in Washington, D.C.) in the future,” she said. “I wanted to see if it was something that I was passionate about to devote my whole life to.”

Onken is a part of Hillsdale’s George Washington Fellowship Program, which accepts six people from each class and provides them with scholarships for school and requires a work component and WHIP. She is doing research for professors in the politics department.

The scholarship helps pay for the WHIP tuition, while each student covers the costs of housing and food. Onken said she began planning for that her freshman year.

She chose to work for the Heritage Foundation because she wanted to focus on research and also editing and publications.

“I was able to kind of figure out my strengths and weaknesses while I was out there,” she said. “Those sorts of things are definitely more of my strengths, and it helped me to sort of see that, ‘Yes, I would be able to do well in Washington if I wanted to go out there.’”

The Heritage Foundation is a nonprofit think-tank that seeks to build an America where freedom and opportunity in a civil society flourish, Onken said.

The organization focuses on five principles: free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values and a strong national defense. It works to educate congressmen and their staffs to make guided policy decisions based on independent research.

Onken said the department she worked with focused on the underlying principles within American political thought.

“So we look at the founding, we understand the principles of the founding and then we look at the different principles between modern liberalism, conservatism and libertarianism, and we’re looking at all of these and trying to make sense of everything that’s there,” she said.

Most of her work was research-oriented. She worked on projects on a variety of topics, from the sociological and psychological effects of ethnocentrism to state balance budget requirements. She also edited items for the publications department and helped with events.

“It showed me what a real work environment is,” she said. “I had done jobs on campus and things, but it was really nice to see how a 9-to-5 office job operates, how to work with co-workers, how to get things done in an efficient manner. It taught me a lot about what a research lifestyle is if I decide to go into a think-tank role, and it showed me that I would be able to succeed in that line of work if I decide to do that.”

The relationships she built with her co-workers were good, too, she said.

“They are incredibly intelligent people that I now can go to if I have any questions about graduate school or life in D.C. or life in general,” she said.

With her classes, Onken said each of them were once a week for two or three hours.

“I’m not an English major, and I’ve never considered myself an English person, but I loved my American lit class,” she said. “My professor was incredible. Sometimes, when I’m in an English class, I feel like things are way too subjective. But he really showed us how these certain authors cared about American virtues and justice. … It was a good, fortifying experience.”

During the semester, Onken also had an opportunity to do some sightseeing. One memorable place for her was the Antietam Civil War battlefield.

“Our tour guide was incredible,” she said. “We had just studied a lot of the Civil War (in the Constitutional history class), and just being on the battlefield with him giving you all of this information, it really brought that classroom experience to life.”

Another highlight was visiting Arlington National Cemetery and seeing the Caisson horse barn, John F. Kennedy Eternal Flame and graves of recent Iraq veterans.

“It’s a somber experience, but it’s incredible when you are there,” she said.

While the experience was one she will never forget, Onken said it was nice to be back at Hillsdale.

“I was out there with fantastic people, my internship was a very great experience and I got to see a whole bunch of very cool sites that are so monumental in our nation’s history, but I still longed for Hillsdale,” she said. “I was (at Hillsdale) for the beginning of the summer doing research for the math department, and being back there was incredible. I was like, ‘Yes, I did miss this,’ but (WHIP) was such a good experience.”

After she finishes her senior year, Onken plans on attending graduate school at either Hillsdale, University of Dallas, University of Notre Dame or Baylor University to pursue a Ph.D. in political philosophy or American political thought.

One day, she said she would like to either teach at the collegiate level in one of those areas or teach high school math.