Oh. I almost forgot about boot camp.

There is a man named Dr. Ed Trayes. He knows amost everyone in the journalism business. This man has taught the Newspaper Fund's editing boot camp — basically a semester-long graduate editing class crammed into two weeks — for 40 years, and he can still name a good number of his interns and tell you where they ended up.

This man ran my life, and the lives of 11 other interns, for two weeks. We had class through the weekend. When we weren't in class, we we studying, and we had a program assistant/RA to make sure that we did (and to provide us with snacks. Lots and lots of snacks).

Basically, we memorized the AP Stylebook and the important parts of the Times stylebook, assorted random pages from this amazing reference book called the Visual Dictionary, and the geography of pretty much the entire world. Oh, and we had lots of spelling tests. And we wrote some headlines. In between that, editors from the Times and the AP and assorted people who came from this program came to talk to us. And did I mention that when we weren't in class, we were studying (even at mealtimes)? We studied a lot.

But the point, acccording to Dr. Trayes, was not so much to makes us know all of it as to make us aware of what we don't know. And that we should always look it up. And, of course, we now have that bond that forms only under extreme duress.