A day in my life interning in Congress (what I wish people knew about working there)

By Sheeva Azma

One thing I wish more people — not just scientists interested in policy, but everyone in the US — knew about how our government works here in the US is how hard Congressional staffers and interns really work. It’s important to know what sacrifices your government makes to support you as constituents, and it’s also good to know as a reality check for scientists who want to, like me, work in Congress.

Understanding this also helps you relate more to your lawmakers (and, I would argue, be more effective in your policymaking endeavors).

For example, if you believed that the lowly, unpaid or underpaid intern answering your phone call was actually some disaffected rich person rolling in lobbyist dough, you’d be way more likely to be rude to them and ruin their already chaotic day (for details about that, keep reading — that’s why I wrote this post). You’d also be completely wrong!

So, that’s where this post comes in to help you understand what interns actually do in Congress.

It’s not meant to dissuade anyone from working in Congress — you should know what you’re getting into as an intern! — but just to give you a realistic insight that you might not get from anywhere else, though I do see a number of Congressional content creators popping up lately!

As an MIT and Georgetown science grad hired as a legislative intern in late 2016 / early 2017, I thought Congress’s label of a “fast-paced” environment was a façade to make the federal legislative body seem more important than it is.

Here’s what I imagined working in Congress to be like — and, to be fair, I had visited my lawmakers at least twice: you walk into an orderly, quiet room where everything is happening smoothly. People are polite and there is nothing happening besides you being there. Things happen one at a time and all is managed without effort.

Wow, was I wrong about that!

To be fair, my mental image of working in Congress was created thanks to the tireless work of dedicated staffers who were all in on supporting their constituents. What I learned, actually working in Congress, is that this appearance is actually the result of a lot of work.

Here’s what a day in my life looked like working in Congress, at the tail end of the Obama administration and the first few weeks of the first Trump administration:

• 4 am: Wake up (if I even was able to sleep) and hit the hotel gym before getting ready for work
• 6 am: Make a couple cups of coffee to wake my brain up, while catching up on the news, before hitting the Metro to get to Capitol Hill.
• I forget exactly, but sometime around 8-9 am: Arrive at work a bit before it opens to make another coffee for the day, organize newspapers and make sure everything looks perfect for visitors.
• 9-11 am: Field calls from constituents — well, until I got kicked off the phones for providing a really detailed analysis to answer a constituent’s question about “Will the Affordable Care Act go away?” When that happened, I would spend my mornings copyediting press releases, opening mail, figuring out the office printer, and attending briefings. Oh, the best part about this in the first Trump administration was the fact that the president would issue a slew of executive orders, which would cause our mostly-Blue district to call us nonstop, and we would field 150 calls from constituents (among a small handful of interns, maybe 3 or 4 at most) in a single morning. Then, that would shift all of our priorities, and the office would have to issue statements on these actions — on top of Congress’s typical, day-to-day duties.
• Sometime between 11 am and 1 pm: Either hop outside to quickly inhale a quick packed lunch (my unglamorous record is 1 minute to eat an entire TastyBite Channa Masala packet on the steps of Rayburn House Office Building), or journey out to nearby jumbo slice purveyor We the Pizza to get out of the office and reclaim my mental health for a moment amidst it all.
• 1 pm to 4:50 pm: I would make another cup of coffee and attempt to write memos (and, at one point, an intern training manual for not only our Congressional office but another one) while our busy House office fielded more phone calls and visitors. The hardest part about this work was not actually the work itself, but trying to maintain professional decorum amidst the most important people in the room (our constituents — not us). Mumbling back snippets of my writing to myself to attempt to reclaim my train of thought and get my brain to process information (if not via mental reading, then via the phonological loop…see, it all makes sense, from a neuroscience perspective, even if I looked super awkward), worked but would often be met with weird reactions, but I had to persevere…because the work had to get done.
• 4:50 pm to 5 pm: I had started mentally checking out for the day around 3 pm, since I had woken up so early (if I had even been able to sleep at all, especially given all the coffee I had been drinking that served to put me in a constant state of awakeness), so I would make another cup of coffee for the road, and look at the clock longingly until we could go home.
• 5 to 6:30 or 7 pm: Attempt to catch up on all of the life stuff I had put off for the whole day, but then realize it would not really be possible. Go home, watch the news (we were on it a lot), and cross off another day of Trump’s first 100 days on the calendar I had gotten from some national laboratory or something else science policy related. Check Facebook to see everyone complaining about the government (which I was now a part of). Maybe go grocery shopping on my shoestring budget, which involved buying a rotisserie chicken, salad greens, trail mix, my favorite chili, and perhaps a box of cookies if I was feeling like I deserved a treat…all charged to a credit card, as was my daily hotel costs…to the tune of $15K or so over nearly three months.

If you think this sounds like a lot of work — it is. That’s not even mentioning all of the logistical challenges our days posed — how to solve a problem with the resources we had, while maintaining the level of professionalism and competence that people expect from Congress. It did not help, for example, that our computers seemed straight out of 1995 — I am pretty sure my desktop took a full five minutes to load. That was not what I was used to as an MIT grad (or someone who relied on fast computing to crunch brain data as a grad student at Georgetown).

Working in Congress exposed me to a new way of working and, with it, a new way of thinking about the world. While, previously, I used to think that facts dictate how we make legislative decisions, I learned firsthand that facts are not always the biggest motivator of decisions. The people always come first in Congress — especially in the House, which is also called “The People’s House,” since its makeup is decided based on state populations — and especially since most politicians aren’t scientists, science facts are not always the forefront of the discussion. It is a powerful lesson that I carry with me today (though I’ve now paid off all the credit card debt, thankfully!).

What questions do you have about working in Congress? Comment below!