During my senior year, a former White House speechwriter came to Georgetown to speak about the craft before a pretty sparse crowd in Copley Formal Lounge. Realizing that this was hardly worth his time, and having been promised that no media would be covering the event, he felt like he could speak a little more ... honestly.

"There was often the feeling," he noted, referring to his time in the White House, "that the speechwriters were running the asylum."

As a speechwriter, you do more than simply write pretty words -- you must analyze political realities, concentrate complex ideas into bite-sized mantras, and write it all based not on how you would say it, but on how your boss would. You are, in essence, a rock tumbler -- smoothing, compacting, and giving something once big and bland a certain look and feel.

Georgetown's classes helped me in this regard. The liberal arts curriculum forces you to become skilled at plucking solid arguments from hollow verbiage. You become adept at nuance, and realize that, in life, there is no black and white, so don't you dare think, or write, like there is. You learn that thinking simply, is hardly thinking.

But in speechwriting, you need to communicate your ideas, no matter how huge or intricate, in a simple way. And my work on WGTB Radio and The Hoya helped me learn to express those sorts of ideas in that sort of way.

On WGTB, I co-hosted Georgetown's only political radio program, and in The Hoya, I wrote more columns -- usually political -- than anyone in over a decade. I don’t say that for ego -- it just took me that long to get good enough at deconstructing and focusing arguments that someone would hire me for this, my dream job.

At WGTB, I became more polished at thinking on my feet, foreseeing rebuttals, and devising sound bites opposite some of the smartest people I'll probably ever meet. And on the op/ed page of The Hoya, I formed, framed and supported my most deeply held of convictions. On those pages, I was already a speechwriter -- just for myself.

Before you can hope to write for someone else, you need to know what you think, and how you would say it. Only then can you know how to finagle your writing, or outlook, to match that of your boss -- you need to understand your own true north.

More than anything else, that's what Georgetown taught me -- how to find, and then how to express, my true north. And that comes in handy in this line of work -- for even if you're not running the asylum, the person who is might need some remarks.