With the election over, there’s no NYU student who deserves a break quite like Jordan Budd.

Budd, a Gallatin sophomore studying what he calls “dismantling privilege: a combination of race relations, politics, history, and social justice,” could put us all to the shame with the amount of work he did during the campaign. While we were watching debates and cracking jokes at Sarah Palin’s incoherent statements, Budd was on the campaign trail, hard at work for then Presidential candidate Barack Obama. Oh yeah, all the while earning college credit at NYU.

After volunteering for over a year, Budd officially became part of the Obama campaign staff in June 2008, working relentlessly up until the presidential election. In Georgia, he was a field organizer, a “pretty much run of the mill job,” he says. In Florida, Budd was given the much more intense duty of Constituency/Base Corps organizer. No longer was he knocking on doors and telephoning strangers, now was dealing with elected officials and community leaders, “making sure that their constituents were taken care of by the campaign”. Not to mention that he “was a full-time student, but [he] wasn’t in the city,” he says, explaining that he was able to earn credit for an independent study as well as an internship. And while the pay wasn’t great, he isn’t complaining. “The motto was, ‘No one is doing this to get rich,’” he laughs.

So while Budd experienced more stress and lack of sleep than NYU students during finals week, he says that “the amount of [life] experience was unparalleled” and well worth it. “The [experience] definitely matured me. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that I’ve aged. The responsibility I had on my head has definitely carried over into college life. And, in this economic climate, any leg-up I have in the job market is one I will take.”

So how’s the political activist adjusting to life back at NYU after a semester without midterms and final papers? “I’m very, very happy to be seeing my good friends on a regular basis. But I’m already kind of bored.”

As happy as Budd is to be able to just be a college kid again, his experiences on the campaign trail have left him a little disenchanted with the academic life. Having been outside the much-hyped halls of academia, Budd came back ready to confirm our suspicion that life in the “real world” is only vaguely related to the lessons learned in school. He explains that he isn’t sorry to be back, but finds that there’s really a “limit to how much you can actually learn inside of the classroom. You can talk all you want about segregation and racism in the South, but if you’ve never actually been down there and seen just how much it hasn’t changed, you’ll never really understand.”

Though he’s temporarily returned to the drudgery of homework and finals like the rest of us, Budd’s well aware of the fact that his graduation coincides with the start of the re-election campaign. Something tells me he won’t be moving onto his parents’ couch after graduation.

Photo courtesy of Jordan Budd.