I’m like a kid in a candy store.

I hop on and off the mass transit system seeing familiar faces, but I can’t place the names and speed through the hallways at a breakneck pace.

Although it sounds as if it could be Boston, I’ve given up my Green Line T for a Red Line Metro, traded those slightly memorable, yet nameless students for press secretaries and politicians and the dingy, dirty halls of the College of Arts and Sciences for the hallowed ground of our nation’s Capital.

So far, I really haven’t missed those bathrooms at all that’s for sure.

Being in Washington has some advantages over Boston, but the city that’s synonymous with baseball, dirty water and Aerosmith will always have a place in my heart.

Since I was in the fourth grade, all I wanted to do was be a journalist. And this is the place to do it, according to my idols, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, who portrayed Watergate-exposing reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in All the President’s Men.

This semester, I’m getting the chance to start my political reporting career in the same city that spawned the most famous investigative journalism series of all time. Luckily, I’m not under the same pressure at my internship with Congressional Quarterly that Woodward and Bernstein were, and my articles for the New Britain Herald probably won’t be making Dubya resign any time soon.

A week ago today, I was a regular citizen. I had no special access to the Capitol. If I went to the building, the only way I’d get into restricted sections is if I was on a Capitol tour or got special clearance from my congressional representatives.

But when I got my credentials Wednesday afternoon and became a Capitol Hill journalist, doors opened, the velvet ropes dropped and the Capitol became my playground. I have the same access as a New York Times reporter or an Associated Press correspondent. While you’re reading this sitting in COM 201, I’ll be interviewing press secretaries at the Rayburn House Office Building on the Hill.

That’s experience.

And while the District has all those advantages over Beantown, some things leave me longing for the city on the river and I’m talking about the Charles, not the Potomac.

While working at the Capitol, people can use the private subway underneath to whisk them between the Capitol and the office buildings of senators and congresspersons. While some see it as a useful service and a way to go from building to building without emptying pockets for metal detectors, it eliminates my favorite game to play while running from class to class on the main Boston University campus, known as ‘dodge the oncoming traffic.’

Even if you decide to travel above ground in the freezing temperatures, I’ve found that drivers in Washington are a lot more courteous than those in Boston it’s just not the same when drivers slow down upon seeing you enter a crosswalk instead of speeding up and taking aim like they do in the Commonwealth.

And although it has numerous selections, the dining hall where journalists dine alongside press secretaries, senators and members of the public trying to find a semi-cheap meal just can’t compete with BU’s Fresh Food Company at West Campus. I really miss waiting nearly 10 minutes to get a piece of undercooked chicken having my food right the first time isn’t the same.

The students in the Washington Journalism Program work, live and sleep at the Washington Center, so we’re here roughly 15 to 20 hours a day, depending on how much work we need to do on the Hill or at our internships, which, for the most part, are at the Washington Bureaus of important news organizations. It’s awful being in the same building as my classes; I’d rather have that 20-minute walk to the College of Communication instead of waking up five minutes before going to work, throwing on a T-shirt and jeans and walking down five flights.

Back at BU, I lived in the Student Village and enjoyed basic cable, with approximately 15 TV channels to choose from. Now, living at the Washington Center, it’s a pain having nearly 80 channels (including HBO and Showtime, mind you) and sitting around watching TV. It definitely takes away from my 70 hours of studying a week for Dr. Silber when I watch A Beautiful Mind more than once a day.

The dorm room also makes it tough to study. My room is a little larger than one in Warren, but I’m the only one living in it (although it technically should be a double not many men applied for my program). In fact, my six-person suite, complete with kitchen and common room, has only two people in it, leaving us with a spare storage room and a bathroom for each of us. Without a roommate pounding on the door while I take a shower, pretending to be Justin Timberlake singing ‘Cry Me a River,’ I tend to spend too much time showering and miss interviews and classes.

So if you’re a journalism student or interested in the very similar Washington Internship Program (where students in political science, history and other majors intern in congressional offices and across the city) and are trying to decide if it’s worth it, I implore you to stay up in Boston.

Why would you want to study journalism or another subject in our nation’s capitol? All you get is a prestigious internship, a lot of clips from a New England newspaper, cable, a suite, possibly a single larger than anything at BU, a pretty large bathroom and a chance to study where history is made every day.

But if you want to visit to make sure you wouldn’t like it down here, living in the center of the political universe and getting amazing experience, just let me know it’s getting a little lonely with just two people in my six-person suite.

We’ve got an extra single with your name all over it.

Bill Yelenak, a junior in the College of Communication and a former news editor of The Daily Free Press, is studying at BU’s Washington Journalism Center.