Kirsten Rappleye is a Utah State alumni, and the current
Assistant to the Utah Senate Majority Caucus. She graduated in 2012, with a
degree in Law and Constitutional Studies. As a student, she was the USUSA
Student Advocate.
IOGP: What do
you do in your career today?
KR: Currently,
I assist the majority caucus. Caucus meetings are held pretty regularly during
the session and throughout the year. I work to do the organization for that,
it’s mostly administrative honestly. I spend most of my time on the communications
side of things. I do public relations and media relations. I spend a lot of my
time, especially during the session, helping senators with their media
contacts. I also do social media, and during the session I have a couple of
communications interns who help me with that too. It really depends on the day.
I do a lot of writing, a little bit of YouTube video creating and during the
session I do pretty much every press conference the Senate does. The sky is the
limit, we do everything around here.
Kirsten and Stew Morrill, 2015
KR: The
internship is the reason why I’m here, to be honest with you. I don’t think I
would have been interested in working in government, at least not in this
capacity, had I not participated in the internship. You kind of fall in love
with the atmosphere, the people and the fact that you’re helping to get things
that really matter done while you’re an intern. I ended up here because the
Chief of Staff over in the Senate, who I had kind of become friends with
through my internship even though I was on the House side, was short a staffer
for the 2012 session. He needed somebody who could kind of jump in quickly, on
a moment’s notice, to help him out with the communications side of things for
that session. Since I had interned twice, and we had loosely kept in contact,
he knew that I was prepared to just jump right back in.
It prepared me for this career in the networking that was
available. It prepared me for the career in that it helped me to understand
that there is good in government still. There are actually people here who really
are honestly just working to make a difference. I don’t have that stigma of
what a politician is that a lot of people do. That’s not without exception of
course.
The internship helped me to realize a lot of things about
myself that I didn’t know before. It helped me to develop my own political
opinions a little bit more and to learn how to be a better researcher. I was
definitely a better student too, as a result of having been here.
Kirsten and the 2015 Interns
IOGP: Who did
you intern for?
KR: The first time I interned with the legislature,
I actually did it twice, was the 2008 session. I interned for my dad,
Representative Frank, and then Representative Brad Winn. The second time I
interned was the 2009 general session. That was my freshman year up at Utah
State. I interned as a policy analyst for the conservative caucus, which was a
group of 30, plus or minus, legislators who got together a couple times a week
during the session to discuss different policy issues and work on projects
together. It was a little bit of a different experience the second time around,
but I kind of couldn’t get enough the first time, so I was happy to be invited
back. I also interned in the summer of 2011 with Mike Lee’s office out in D.C.
From Kirsten's 2008 internship
IOGP: What
were some of the highlights of your internships?
KR: The 2008
session was really awesome because I got to experience, for the first time
really, firsthand what the legislative process is actually like. In the news,
you read about the political side of things and interns who come here, years
before me and years after me, all get to understand and watch the actual legislative
process in an up close and personal way. In a textbook, for example, you can
read about the committee process and things like that, but watching it was
awesome. It made me fall in love with state-level politics.
Other things I loved about the legislative internship
were the people that I got to work with. That was seven years ago, and I still
actually regularly interact with a lot of the people who I interned with back
then. Many of them are currently working in Utah political offices.
From Kirsten's 2008 internship
IOGP: What are
some of the advantages of being an intern in Salt Lake with the state
legislature?
KR: I’ll tell
you what, if I had to pick looking back, while I loved my D.C. experience and
it is completely unlike anything I’ve ever done, the value of the learning that
you get in the legislative internship is actually higher. You’re kind of the
chief of staff to the person who you’re working for because the legislative
staff here is really small. Even right now we have 29 senators and something
like nine full-time people. For us who work here now, we can’t even wait for
the interns to get here and help the senators and help the representatives
because they need it.
Interns get to be
part of policy discussions. There have been multiple times when different
legislators have asked interns, “What do you think about this?” While interns
shouldn’t express their opinions, and that’s actually looked down upon, it’s a
really good chance for them to get to dialogue regularly and be relied upon by
the legislator they work for.
I hear it all the time that D.C. interns get to interact
maybe once or twice with the member that they are working for. Here, personal
relationships are insane. As a staff member I grow strange attachments to the
interns that work here. We stay in contact with them, and they come up and
visit.
Kirsten with the 2008 Interns
KR: I can only
speak for the Senate side, really, on that. I don’t know exactly how the House
uses their interns these days. For us, we go through quite a process to match
interns to Senators prior to the session. We spend a lot of time trying to make
the right matches because different Senators use their interns in different
ways. For example, a USU intern, Justine Larsen, was the Senate President’s
intern two years ago. When we interviewed her, it was very clear that she was
very good with research. She’d had a lot of experience there. Her manner was
pleasant, quiet, and respectful, but confident. Once we got to know her, it was
very apparent that she was a very good candidate to be the Senate President’s
intern, because that’s the kind of person he needs.
The Senate President would use his intern for things like
making sure his meetings go on schedule, keeping his schedule during the
session, a lot of policy research and sitting in on meetings on his behalf.
Other Senators use their interns to help them with their social media.
We keep our interns really, really busy. They are a
really integral part of the process for us. I don’t know how the session would
go without our interns, but I don’t like to imagine it because it would be
something of a nightmare. I can’t even tell you how many times I have heard
from Senators how important their interns are to them during that time. Many of
them stay in touch with their interns for years to come.
Media Conference, 2014
IOGP: What
advice do you have for students considering a legislative internship?
KR: Just do
it! I know for a lot of people it is inconvenient to take a semester off. I
know that sometimes the drive doesn’t seem very good, or the arrangements as
far as housing don’t seem awesome, but these internships really do change the
course of people’s lives probably more often than not. So for anyone who has
inhibitions about it or who doesn’t like the inconvenience that it could
present, I would just say forget all that and do it. People don’t regret coming
and spending time here. It ends up being something that they’ll treasure for
the rest of their lives. There is a legislator here for every type of intern.
