Before the semester began someone from Steve Kornell’s campaign sent an email out to the class, giving a little information about Steve and asking us to consider an internship with his campaign. Before class I looked up Steve’s website and learned a bit more about him. My interest was piqued when I had read that he was a social worker looking to start his political career. I am in the midst of applying for MSW programs so I saw this as a great opportunity to learn more about Social Work and how it pertains to local politics, something I am very interested in. I won’t say that my mind was completely made up before coming to the Internship Job Fair but I was leaning towards joining the Kornell campaign.
Many of those who showed up seemed like they were great candidates, and honestly by what they said about themselves and what was in their bio many of the candidates had very similar stances on the issues. However, I did feel that too many candidates were making grand promises of fun and fancy business cards in an attempt to win us over without mentioning what would be expected of their interns on a day to day basis. Going into the internship fair I expected it to be a reverse job interview where each candidate would give an overview of their campaign, a mission statement if you will, and then explain what tasks they expected the interns to perform. This did not really seem to happen, it seemed more like a pitch for a recreational summer camp with all the talk about fun. Granted, enjoyment is an important aspect to working, especially when you are not getting paid to do it, but I did not feel that fun should have been the most pressed issue of the day. Assuming that most people in the class are taking this class because they are interested in working on campaigns or in local government in the future it seems that they would want to be able to boast about the skills they learned in this internship more so than how much fun they had being the low man on the totem pole. Since nobody really stressed what their demands on the interns would be I was forced to go with my gut instinct and choose the Kornell campaign because at the very least I could learn about how he integrates his Social Work skills into the campaign and what he could do as a councilman to make the lives of those vulnerable populations better.
After class Kate, Carlos and I went to lunch with Steve Kornell and Steve Lapinski to discuss the campaign and the internship. This is where I found the answers to the questions I hoped would be answered during the job fair. An intern on the campaign will get their feet wet with many different tasks from the menial to the complex. We would each however, have a specialization in one area that we find particularly enjoyable and would be put in charge of one or more events. This way we would not all be doing the same thing but we would be able to still work as a group for certain projects. It was at this time that I was fully on board with the Kornell Campaign.
