By Kara Mak, 2026 CLA Intern
Over the past couple of weeks, the advice I have heard time and time again from CLA alumni, CAUSE board members, and government staffers is to take initiative at my host office. Before beginning at the Office of Congresswoman Judy Chu, I did not expect how deeply I would come to live by that advice in my work life.
After the first couple days of training, when I began getting more comfortable and less anxious about the usual intern job duties, I realized that there was a lot of downtime between tasks. Being the type of person who likes to keep herself busy, this downtime became boredom very quickly, and I also didn’t like feeling like I wasn’t contributing meaningfully to my office. So, by the end of my first week, I took the initiative to ask one of the new field representatives if I could help her by creating a resource with the names and photos of city officials representing the areas she is assigned to. She happily said yes, and I was added onto the field representative resource project that the interns, working on the opposite days as me, had been working on for the past couple of weeks. Through that interaction, I learned that more often than not, those in the office will always appreciate the help, and the initiative it takes to ask them if and what they may need help with. Since completing the field representative project, I have asked to lead and take on two additional projects, utilizing my skills, interests, and time to find small ways to make a difference in the district office.
Sometimes, it takes the same kind of initiative and resourcefulness to help constituents calling the office for assistance. Constituents call hoping that we can help them with a plethora of different concerns and situations. The ones responsible for picking up the phones—interns, like myself— do not always have an answer or solution for them. However, serving in this role has taught me how to find those answers on my own, or at least, find someone else who might have an answer for them. The most memorable instance of this occurred last week, when we were trying to help a constituent in Vietnamese with USCIS. No one in the office could speak Vietnamese, so we typed out what we wanted to say into Google Translate, then played the Vietnamese translation out loud on speaker for the constituent over the phone. Becoming frustrated, the constituent hung up. We began scouring the internet for a resource that could assist him in-language. Surprisingly, there were none. However, I was able to find an immigration resource center that could refer him to another agency that could possibly assist him in Vietnamese. While calls like these can be difficult to manage, they have demonstrated to me just how valuable our office is to the community, and just how important our role, resourcefulness, and ability to take initiative as interns is to making a difference in someone else’s life.