This week, the host office slowed down. Staff members were on vacation or out sick, so a lot of the time, it was just a couple of interns and a couple of staff at the office. Also, the office — successfully — hosted the Southeast Los Angeles Arts Festival that they had been working on for the entire summer, making the tasks for the rest of the week much more slow-paced than they had been for the previous month.
Walking into the office the first day after our Sacramento Capitol Trip, I spent hours talking with my staff about my experience. A large part of that was talking about the people I had met. I’m still surprised how many people know each other in the realm of California state politics. All of the staff members had been at the capitol before, so they confirmed a lot of the lessons I had learned from the week.
Being that it was a slower week, I also got to spend a lot of time talking about grad school with my supervisor. She did a master’s in public policy, and it was interesting hearing her perspective about going to graduate school right after her undergraduate experience. To her, she likes to plan and feel assured in her skills and abilities — which made the immediate transition to her master’s program easier — and in the future, she would consider pursuing a Ph.D. to teach Public Admin/Public Policy at her alma mater.
One of the more exciting things I got to do was public outreach! In college, or even high school for that matter, event publicity mainly consisted of email blasts, Instagram, and posting flyers everywhere you could find a blank wall or door. Obviously, at an Assembly District Office, it’s a bit more complicated than that. One of the ways that this office has found success in reaching out to people is through laundromats! Laundromats often have bulletin boards or places to put flyers out, so we went around different cities posting flyers at every laundromat I could find. I had created Google maps of every single laundromat in each city beforehand, so it was a quick and efficient process.
Towards the end of the day, I found out that it was one of the intern’s last days. There were only three of us, so I had grown incredibly close to the interns, especially the intern who left. It was a bittersweet goodbye: his assigned field supervisor made him a certificate, the same one we’d been making for months now. Like most things, impermanence is perhaps the most beautiful part of our growing relationships.
I ended the week with an assembly district meeting. This was, surprisingly, the first time I got to see the Chief of Staff do her work. She has been in the assembly for (20 years?), and she clearly exhibited her experience. She seemed to know every single person working at the state capitol and had a very confident, authoritative, but still compassionate style of leading the meeting. I noticed that no one was taking or had meeting minutes, but every single staff member perfectly remembered everything they needed to say. I think our chief of staff only had an agenda written on a tiny post-it note. I’m hoping to get to that level of ease in organization some-day because I feel like I have to write everything down to remember anything during meetings!
The views and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not reflect the views or positions of CAUSE or the CAUSE network.
Written by Kenny Lê, Leadership Academy 2023 Intern.
The CAUSE Leadership Academy (CLA) for students is a nine-week, paid, internship program that prepares college undergraduates to lead and advocate for the Asian Pacific Islander community on their campuses and beyond.