Caught up in the campaign fervor surrounding the November midterm elections, senior Moses Weisberg made a choice.

Instead of returning to campus this fall to begin his senior year, he’ll be trading a semester of college for the opportunity to be in the middle of the political action this election season.

Weisberg is working on Colorado Republican Ken Buck’s campaign for Senate, and believes this year’s elections have the ability to impact Congress so much that he’s decided to forgo classes.

He began working with Buck’s campaign over the summer, managing Federal Elections Commission compliance, and assisting with donor contacts and fundraising events, experiences he called “phenomenal.”

“I think that there’s an immense amount of value to learning about an abstract level of politics,” Weisberg said. “My political involvement is more than just a classroom conversation. It’s probably a calculation of the value you believe you’re going to get from graduating at a specific time versus getting one or two years worth of experience in the job you want to do before you graduate.”

He took his first semester off two years ago in the fall of 2008 to work on another campaign. As a result, he will graduate with the Class of 2012 instead of with the Class of 2011. He said he found GW “relatively” helpful when it came to canceling housing and classes, but said he wishes “that they had a program that was more directly tailored to my experience.”

Although he does not recommend the experience to everyone, he thinks anyone who has “a pretty good idea of what they want to do” should take such an opportunity.

He is not the only student to take advantage of this year’s high stakes election season.

Senior Amanda Pettengill is spending the semester in North Carolina working on Victory, a program designed by the Republican National Committee “for all the races around the country.”

Pettengill interned for the RNC last summer and was offered a job with Victory.

At the RNC, “they were talking about how they needed people out in the states,” she said.

Pettengill is involved with all of the volunteer recruitment, phone banking, knocking on doors and fundraising.

“This is a great year [for politics] and kind of a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” Pettengill said. “I can always make up a semester.”

Junior Conor Rogers will be staying at GW this fall, but will be dividing his time between classes and running his own political consulting business.

“I help campaigns translate their message into language that’s going to make sense on social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter. It’s one part translating, one part building the message,” Rogers said.

He is working with one congressional campaign, one local state race in New Jersey and two public affairs firms. He estimates he will be spending about 30 hours a week doing consulting work, in addition to taking five classes and working on the political blog The Politicizer, where he serves as editor in chief.

“I think there is an advantage to staying in school and graduating on the same schedule. If you lose a semester then you lose a whole six months to enter the job market,” Rogers said.

Despite having his own business, Rogers says he needs to consider different jobs on the side to keep an income during lulls in business and for the possibility that his enterprise could fail in the future.

Neither Rogers nor Pettengill is receiving internship credit for these extracurricular activities, but Weisberg is.

“Three credits is by no means representative of the amount of work people do taking semesters off for campaigns,” Weisberg said.u