Authored by Zach Regen ’17

My Summer as a Ready to Govern Fellow

My official title at my internship was a Ready to Govern Fellow.

I learned about my Internship originally because my Dad had done some work with the Partnership a while back and told me about what they do. I thought it sounded interesting so I went online and applied.

The team I was on at the Partnership for Public Service was focused on trying to improve the Presidential Transition process through a variety of ways which has historically been very messy and inefficient. I was focused on the appointment side of the transition process so I would do many research projects that would be used to help educate the Clinton and Trump campaigns on the appointment process and how they can get more and better people into office quickly after the inauguration. One of my biggest projects was creating a committee by committee information sheet which would say how many people were approved by each committee in 2009 after the inauguration to the August recess. It includes a graph for each committee with the pass and failure rate, as well the number and specific cabinet level secretaries that go through that committee. It includes many other useful pieces of information for each committee that could potentially assist the President-elect in understanding the appointment process for that committee and just how difficult it can be. I created the template for these information sheets and did most of the research. Another major project I worked on was updating and fact checking position descriptions that had been made by the Romney Transition Team back in 2012. These descriptions would be about 4 pages in length and would cover a long list of information including past people who held the positions and there background, positions overview, management scope, pay scale, and other useful info. It is astounding that the government doesn’t have any sort of description for even the most important positions in the federal government. In the past every transition team has had to create these from scratch, but now the Clinton and Trump transition teams will be way ahead of their predecessors and be much more informed.

Throughout the summer I gained an incredible amount of knowledge and experience while working as a fellow at the Partnership for Public Service. I learned how to be more professional and the customs of working in an office. I was taught and guided through the process of how to do proper research for many different projects I worked on including finding out which US senators would be the best to approach about adding in questions about leadership and management in the appointment process, looking and then creating a database for what position every single person who was on the Obama Agency Transition team was appointed to after the inauguration in 2009 if they were appointed at all, and tracking different pieces of legislation through congress. I also immensely improved my Excel and PowerPoint skills to a much more advanced and professional level beyond what you would just use in school. We also had workshops to improve our public speaking, resumes, computer skills, networking, and interviewing skills.

I strongly recommend an internship like this for someone who has any interest in working for the federal government in some way. It is a great overview of the government because you get find out about so many different parts of it and meet some pretty well connected people who have worked in various parts of the government for decades and been very successful. These types of internships are very competitive though and not easy to get. I would recommend beefing up your resume as much as possible and really spend a lot of time on your application before you send it in because the hard part is actually grabbing their attention to get an interview.