Week 3 – Personal Contributions
My internship with Senator Ossoff’s office has been very fast pace, and challenging at times. Given my assignment to the transportation/infrastructure/labor portfolio, we have had a lot of legislation moving around with the upcoming infrastructure package which has given me a lot of opportunities to contribute through research memos, policy analysis, policy recommendations and in both internal meetings and meetings with constituents. Since my first day, I have been doing constant research on various infrastructure related proposals, and for other areas of our portfolio as well, both new and existing to see how they can be used to address the problems of today.
Given my own limited/different experience with transportation policy and the policy areas I am working in, I have been able to bring in a new perspective as a new set of eyes given that in my team – my supervisor has spent over ten years working on the hill and with other groups on transportation policy, and my other colleague has been working in Senate offices for almost 5 years. So in a way, being able to come in with a fresh set of eyes and help to evaluate the different policies we’re looking at has been helpful.
Leadership in the Senate as a whole is also interesting because on a larger scale, it’s not necessarily the same as it is in a typical office, but rather it is more like thought leadership, and leading through communicating and bringing people together. In this way, I have been able to help support the Senator’s efforts by doing more research on the priorities of other members to figure out how we can persuade them to support our legislation as well. In addition to doing research, I’ve also been drafting some of the documents that we use to “sell” the legislation.
Outside of the legislative work itself, as a cohort the other interns and I have been doing a lot of the administrative work too, in terms of doing intake for and organizing of constituent messages and correspondence. This has taken a lot of communication on our end and team work to ensure that we are getting done what we need to get done for that in a timely manner, and also doing it effectively. And it’s been interesting to see how we have all brought our own experiences to shape the process for this in terms of knowing from experience what works best for methods of communication, or organizing the work itself, and even for ensuring that everything is consistent.
Over the next few weeks of my internship, I’m hoping to get more opportunities to participate in constituent meetings, attend think tank events, and other similar events where I can continue to learn more about the issues I am working on and different policy solutions which will all enable me to maximize my contributions to the office.