Carly Reed, District Scheduler

Video Transcript

I am the Congressman’s district scheduler, which means that I am responsible for being the liaison between anyone requesting any amount of his time, whether that’s a meeting or an event or anything like that. And I’d say an important part of my job is just interacting with a whole host of different people who want to reach out to their member of Congress which highlights I think a really important aspect of the legislative process is that your representative serves your district. So when you are in a really interesting and diverse and exciting district, like the California 15th district, you get a whole host of people from every imaginable industry or walk of life who would like to speak with the Congressman and understand a little bit more about what’s going on in DC.

I think I first became interested in government as a high school student. Just taking AP US history and the government classes. I studied political science at UC Berkeley and I think as a student at Berkeley I learned that government can be connected to public service and, kind of inherently I guess you could say, and that the whole point of government is to serve the public and my community which I think is such a cool goal.

I got to be an intern at another Senate office between my junior and senior year of college and that definitely helped me see that politics or public service rather is the career path that I wanted to go down. This past summer before starting this job I got the opportunity to work on a campaign which was really great to see that side of things. Kind of the flipside of what a government office looks like. A campaign is something totally different and it’s definitely something I’d recommend for anyone interested in public service.

After a summer of interning at the Senate office I was previously working at, a former boss forwarded me this job posting and then kind of from there was able to do my interviews and helped me really get to this position today. I know that the people that you encounter, who you look up to, it’s really beneficial to let them know that and to just say, hey, I’d like to grab a cup of coffee with you and kind of pick your brain about a certain topic. I’m relatively new and this is my first job right out of college. And so that in and of itself I think was – it was a steep learning curve of coming aboard and having a lot of different responsibilities. And I’d say I overcame it by just the support of the staff here who’ve been around for a while and really making me feel comfortable here and being able to have those personable resources nearby are really helpful. So definitely the teamwork in this office is a good thing.