The Lectern: Good jobs for young people in government

I got a really upbeat email a week ago from a recent Kennedy School grad (and course assistant for my public management course), Andrew Vogt, who with the help of his Russian language skills, took a job upon graduation about 18 months ago at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), the DOD agency in charge of keeping an eye on "loose nukes" in places such as the former Soviet Union. To put it mildly, their mission is of life-and-death importance for all of us, and I was really proud that Andrew had gotten, and taken, this opportunity. We've been staying in touch since graduation, and he checked in last week:

Everything is going very well at DTRA, and I think you will be happy to hear that they are doing a very good job of putting young people into challenging roles with significant responsibility. I have been the government representative for one site visit to a nuclear storage facility and continue to 'run' (still hard to believe) a project as an international project manager. It is an amazing opportunity.

Any other young feds want to join a dialogue about your job responsibilities? Are you being given interesting, challenging, and meaningful work, or not?