Author: Hank Herzfeld, History major

This past Spring semester I interned with the state office of Senator John Boozman of Arkansas in Lowell. It was an incredibly eye-opening experience to see all of what our elected officials are responsible for with their obligations to constituents (voters). I wanted to work this internship as a supplement to my education for the semester so I could learn more about the day-to-day goings-on of Senator Boozman and to contextualize some of what I have been learning in my undergraduate studies. I am a History and Political Science major, and I have always been interested in pursuing law school and local politics after graduating. In this role, I essentially became a part-time office secretary: I answered phone calls, processed constituent opinions and concerns, and was the first line of defense against the mailman and the barrage of incoming messages. Ultimately, it was a pretty low- stress position, and I had flexible hours and responsibilities that mostly required rerouting information from one location to another. At times there was nothing for me to do but wait on calls and other times I worked steadily through a full four-hour shift. I helped mitigate the chaos of a long-time employee’s absence from the office by helping process and originate cases for the new holder of her position, and I digitized files in a reformatting situation to go along with this transition. The nature of the office demands a level of confidentiality, but I was regularly engaging with files and cases on the behalf of veterans, military academy applicants, and at-risk constituents. The beauty of the senator’s state office is that it sits on the constituent services side of the senator’s responsibilities—senators generally divide their offices into two categories: constituent services and policy work. Typically there are policy experts and legislative support staff doing the policy work for the senator in Washington D.C., and then the rest of the staff is dedicated to giving back directly to the state. This includes attending meetings with local organizations with the senator or on his behalf, helping manage requests for various things from the senator, and most importantly, working with government agencies on the behalf of constituents who need assistance getting something done with that agency. This last item takes up a majority of the senator’s staff at the state level, and in Senator Boozman’s office we worked with just about any agency you can name, most frequently the Veterans Affairs office and the Social Security Administration. Now that my internship there is completed, I am looking forward to seeing the opposite side of the senator’s office in an internship in Washington D.C. in July! I will hopefully be getting a better taste of the legislative and Congress-facing activities of the senator and his offices, and I look forward to a much different but hopefully equally rewarding experience.