This National Intern Day: Announcing ‘Intern-a-Palooza!’
This National Intern Day, the POPVOX Foundation is pleased to announce the launch of the Fall 2021 Intern Orientation, also known as Intern-a-Palooza! This two-day free orientation and welcome event for Congressional interns is hosted by the POPVOX Foundation and organizations involved in the First Branch Intern Project, in collaboration with the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. The event is intended to provide a warm welcome and words of advice to all Congressional interns—remote, DC, District, and prospective interns considering a future application—as they kick off their internships.
Investing in interns is investing in Congress
A Congressional internship can be a pivotal experience. The overwhelming majority of Hill staffers start their careers as Congressional interns, learning how the legislative process works, how to get things done in Washington, and the less tangible skills of professionalism, grace under pressure, and building a strong network of peers and mentors. Even for interns who do not go into politics, this experience and connections can be a powerful stepping stone to future success.
That said, the benefits flow both ways: it is not an exaggeration to say that without interns, Congress can barely function. Interns supplement staff roles to answer phones, draft legislative and communications materials, handle volumes of constituent correspondence, and perform many of the legacy manual tasks of legislating that Congress has not yet invested to automate. Congress relies on its interns for short-term tasks and for future staff roles, and benefits from a diverse, talented intern pool.
But for many talented students, Congressional internships are financially out of reach, even outside of DC. Further, the lack of centralization in Hill practices for onboarding, training, and management have meant significant variation between offices: without experienced career counselors or peers to rely on, students from schools that don’t traditionally ‘feed’ into DC internships have to cross their fingers and hope they picked a great office with the experience and bandwidth to support them.
Great progress, but much work to be done
Over the last several years, we have seen huge strides made to address these issues, driven by advocacy both on and off the Hill. As a result of the work of organizations like Pay Our Interns, College to Congress, the Congressional Management Foundation, Demand Progress, the Black Womens Congressional Alliance, and more, many Congressional offices now offer paid internships, widening the pool of potential interns and recognizing the vital contributions interns make toward the business of Congress. We are thrilled to see the work of the Committee on House Appropriations to expand funding for Hill internships in this year’s spending package, and the ongoing efforts of the Committee on House Administration and the Office of Diversity and Inclusion to ensure that House offices have the support they need make their internship programs educational and rewarding for all students.
This work continues across Congress: just today, the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress issued several recommendations to improve the intern experience in Congress, including a central internship coordinator for the House, a study examining the feasibility of ongoing remote internships, and assessing the cost of living for an intern in the nation’s capital.
We applaud all of these ongoing efforts, and are hopeful that they point to a new chapter in Congressional internships.
However, there is still much work to be done. Pay Our Interns’ study on Who Congress Pays showed vast disparities in the demographics of interns who receive stipends for their internships—including the shocking finding that in POI’s survey, not one Hill office employed an intern studying at a community college, even though community colleges educate millions of students nationwide. The Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress’s recent hearing on enriching the internship and fellowship experience also raised important issues around a lack of consistent data on Hill internships, and how a lack of diversity in the internship pipeline has important consequences for diversity in paid staff.
The COVID-19 pandemic also put more barriers between talented students and Congress than ever before, with many offices struggling to create enriching remote opportunities or canceling their internship programs altogether. Especially for interns about to graduate and jump into the job market, the missed opportunities of canceled Congressional internships may be difficult to recoup later.
About the Intern Project
The First Branch Intern Project—originally the Virtual Intern Project—was convened in early 2020 to support Congressional interns in the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the last year and a half, organizations participating in the Intern Project have regularly come together to share best practices, coordinate information sharing, and help support interns and intern coordinators navigating the transition to remote work and back.
The Fall 2021 Intern Orientation is a continuation of that collaboration: a collaborative project between organizations participating in the Intern Project, in cooperation with the Select Committee, the Orientation’s goals are to provide a warm welcome and starting foundation of skills to all Congressional interns; to demonstrate the value of a centralized standard internship onboarding, and to help recruit and welcome interns from diverse backgrounds to Congress. Thanks to the generosity of participating organizations with their time and expertise, we will be able to offer discussions on best practices for Hill interns, behind-the-scenes on how Congress really works, networking and mentorship opportunities, tips on Ethics rules, interacting with constituents, career planning, financial smarts for surviving DC, and more.
As many former interns ourselves, we can personally speak to the life-changing experience of interning in a Congressional office: the friends we made and mentors we found are still important parts of our professional lives; the skills and confidence we gained set us up for success in Congress and beyond in our careers. We are honored to play a small role in making that experience accessible and rewarding to students from all backgrounds, and we look forward to welcoming the Fall 2021 class of Congressional interns as they start one of the most exciting and important experiences of their careers.
Hill offices interested in registering their interns for the event should reach out at internproject.org/events/internapalooza, or to info@popvox.org.
