Last
semester in my Government 103 class, Introduction to American Politics, my
professor Dr. Victor talked to us about the URAP Research Assistant positions
and the different projects that are available to work on for the spring
semester. In my free time I looked at all the different projects and applied to
three that caught my interest, I was happy to find out that one of the projects
was conducted by my current professor and was super excited when she
interviewed me and gave me the opportunity to be her research assistant.
The
project I am working on is data collection and analyzation of Congressional
Caucuses. Every week, I check out this big phone-book-like book called the
Congressional Yellow Pages, which contains detailed information on every member
of Congress and I record which caucus’ they are in into a large spreadsheet.
This is a very time consuming process and just recently we have finished all
435 members of the House of Representatives. Before I started this project I
really had no idea how government majors conduct research, but now I have first
hand experience with it and now have a better understanding of the research in
my field of interest. While Congressional Coding might not be the exact thing I
want to do as a career, this RA position opened up a world of opportunities I
didn’t know existed, before I wasn’t quite sure on what kind of jobs people had
with a government major other than being a politician but now I see that
researcher is a big and popular option.
After
reading 435 representative profiles in the Congressional Yellow Book I learned
exactly how many caucus there are in Congress and how they are basically small
groups of people with a very specific purpose to work and improve their topic,
an example being the
Congressional
Submarine Caucus or the Congressional Food Safety Caucus. The legislative
branch is far more complex than I thought and I’m glad I had the experience to
learn about it.
