A few months ago, I received an email that Patriot Academy was offering 18-25 year olds an opportunity to come to their Texas campus and spend an entire month learning American history, apologetics, and volunteer work around the grounds. I'm outside the age range, and my family wasn't comfortable sending my brother alone.

A few weeks later, we got another email - Patriot Academy had expanded the age range to 29! Me and my brother quickly signed up, and a short time later we received word that we were accepted! Even better, I was given an offer to transfer from the Coach Congress to the National Leadership Congress. I took them up on it!

My brother and I arrived on campus in early July and settled into our cozy Patriot Cottages. For the first week, my brother, me, and about thirty other students took Constitutional Defense, a class where you learn more about firearms, shooting, and managing malfunctions than most police academies! We signed a petition to make Patriot Academy its own mununcipality: Constitution City, Texas. We also learned apologetics from Krish Dhanam, networking from Tristan Ghazal, hosting classes from Toni Shuppe, podcasting from Adam Curry, and many others. In the mornings, which were unusually temperate for Texas in July, the entire student body helped Patriot Academy staff with campus maintenance. I painted several shelters and a medical building, organized stuff in one of the spare ranges, and cleaned the Floor in the ConDef building. In the evenings we stargazed, played games, watched movies in the ConDef building, and went bowling!

Then it was time to trade in my casual clothes for blazers and slacks for Leadership Congress. I was ready with my bill on implementing term limits for North Carolina legislators and armed with supplemental research. I got my red Senator nametag, joined the George Washington committee, and then couldn't find my chair for the first day so my bill never made it to the lineup for debate. I'm not terribly bummed about that, since term limits was not a very popular topic among the student body this year, and it probably wouldn't have passed, anyway.

The debates were long, hard, and nuanced. Out of 169 bills, only 6 made it to the floor, and only 3 were signed by the Leadership Congress governor. Rick Green, founder of Patriot Academy, said that it exactly what he likes to see - a legislative body so rooted in the LIFT principles (Limited Government, Individual Liberties, Free Enterprise, and Timeless Truths), that only the cream of the crop made it into law.

Now that the month is over, I know I'll look fondly back on these days, It's a bit bittersweet, having officially aged out, but there's a new season ahead of me!