There are not very many reasons I would wake up at 5:30 in the morning. If you told me a year ago that I would waking up just to go see a 74-year-old senator from Vermont, I would say you were crazy. But after all this is an election year and as we have seen, it makes people do crazy things.

I have wanted to see Bernie Sanders speak for quite some time now. Whenever I heard he was coming to Pittsburgh, I figured there was no way I could not go. However, when I saw the time that the doors to the David L Lawrence Convention Center were supposed to open I was surprised. Sanders was not supposed to speak until 10 a.m. but the doors opened at 7:30 a.m.? There’s no way it would take that long to fill the place up, so I had thought.

Nothing could have prepared me for the massive line that awaited me when I got there, shortly after the doors were scheduled to open. It went from the entrance of the convention center, snaked around the parking garage and up to the second floor of the building. Once inside, the line went still went on. And despite all this, everything was pretty organized.

When the senator finally came out, with David Bowie’s “Starman” blaring over the system, it was hard not to get swept up in the moment. There I was, with what is now estimated at about 8,550 people, waiting to hear one man speak his mind. But I had to wonder, did anybody really care what he was saying, or were they just there to take a photo and post it to Twitter?

It was easy to tell the difference between who would come out to vote for him for the Pennsylvania primary, and those that just wanted to say they were there. The ones who would cheer unprovoked were the ones listening to what he said.

Sanders gave a pretty inspirational speech, based on the changes that he has seen across the country in the past 50 years and what changes he still thinks are necessary. He also focused on how his humble upbringings shaped his morals in life. What surprised me the most was how much he criticized Hillary Clinton in his speech. At a time when Republicans are separated and disjointed, it was interesting to see Sanders try so hard to distance himself from Clinton. He brought this up on national television last week, when he doubted that Clinton was fit to be president because of her past judgements, but not because of her experience. On a campaign that is based on equality for all, I do not think Sanders should put so much effort in to disqualifying Clinton. If he is not successful in securing the nomination, he will have posed some questions to his followers that would make them hesitate in supporting her until November.

But since his appearance in Pittsburgh, Sanders has been performing pretty well. He has won the last 8 out of 9 states, the most recent being Wyoming on April 9th. If he somehow manages to pull off landslides in New York and California, things will look pretty good for him. But no matter the outcome, I will still be able to look back and say my first political event was a worthwhile experience, even if I did have to get up way too early.