Monica Hernandez, 21, a senior at the University of Northern Colorado, knew when she was a freshman that she wanted to intern for Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.). Although she was told she was too young, Hernandez persevered and began her internship for the senator this past summer.

“It is so much better than anything I could’ve imagined,” she said.

For six weeks this past summer, she rotated through every department of Domenici’s office, from receptionist to guiding tours.

On one tour, she was so eager to describe the architecture of Capitol Hill that she accidentally bumped into a lawmaker from Massachusetts.

“I was taking some constituents on tour,” she recalled. “I was getting off the trolley, about to talk about architecture, and I spun around really fast and smacked into a senator from Massachusetts.”

Hernandez declined to say whether the senator she ran into was John Kerry or Edward Kennedy.

Hernandez so impressed Domenici’s staffers that they invited her to come back for the fall. After finishing her senior thesis on “Crime and Punishment during the Victorian Era in England” and fitting in a political-science major, Hernandez intends to be a deputy press secretary on Capitol Hill.