Michelle Obama Talks About the Transition

NEWSWEEK: Settling in with the family in Washington … do you have any idea of how you ' ll do that?
Michelle Obama: We'll be using every second of the transition time to work out timetables and timelines and all that good stuff. But the hope is that everybody settles in at the same time. So that we won't be transitioning portions of the family at different periods of time. But how, when and where—we don't know enough. At this stage, it's difficult to really have good conversations about schools and all that stuff because you don't want to measure the drapes.

This is the first transition for the family — the first move to a different place.
Yes.

So is that daunting?
It's just unknown. And like any new thing, it feels a bit daunting until you have your plan. What I do know is that once the pieces start coming together, I think that's when the excitement can begin. When the girls know what school they're going to be in, they'll have a sense of how that's going to feel, and they'll know what their rooms look like. All my anticipation is really around the girls, making sure that they're OK. Barack and I … it's going to be a hard job. He likes hard jobs [laughs]. We know we have a lot of work to do. That's just a natural part of it. But as soon as I know that the kids are where they need to be, the other stuff is just hard work, which we are used to.

You want to continue what you did with Public Allies [ which trains young people to become leaders of community groups and nonprofits] as First Lady. What ' s your thinking on how to go about that?
Barack is talking about a deeper investment in national service; that's been part of his platform. He's been meeting with some of the leadership of the AmeriCorps national-service movements—the Public Allies, the Teach for Americas, the City Years of the World—and figuring out how do we use that model, expand upon it, and help use that as a more creative way to defray the costs of college for young people and get all Americans really engaged. What AmeriCorps showed me, during the time that I worked on it, is that all these resources of young people, and not-so-young people, as I call them—because AmeriCorps is not just for young adults but people of all ages—you can fill a lot of gaps with the help of community-service hours. The young people in my program worked as program directors. They worked with kids and they worked in parks and they worked with nonprofit organizations that didn't have the resources to bring people in full time. So this is one of those clear win-wins. You can help kids pay for school, you can get needed man-hours into really critical things like the environment, senior care, Head Start—a whole range of things. And you get the country more focused on giving back.