Lauren Fisher has been an intern on the Catt Center’s Archives of Women’s Political Communication since last August. She wrote this reflection paper as part of the requirements for completing an internship for her political science major.
By Lauren Fisher, junior in political science and Catt Center intern
This fall, I served as an intern in the Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University. My position was in the archives—documenting, analyzing, and compiling political ads and speeches from female politicians in the United States. In this role, I developed useful research skills when finding information on female politicians and became familiar with WordPress, the system that the Catt Center uses to run their website. I learned how to organize the information I found and accurately catalogue political ads and speeches into a website. I also became skilled at identifying political ideologies from the ads and speeches from women in the field of politics. This skill has improved my analysis ability in political science because I can now recognize and connect communication methods to what a certain candidate believes and/or which party they align themselves with. I can now think more critically about the relationship between communication and political success from my work in the Catt Center archives.
These skills will help me after graduation and in my future professional field because I will be better at finding the information I need in an efficient manner. With the research skills I developed, I will be able to work in many different areas within organizations with my knowledge of the inner workings of website management, and I will be able to use my improved analytical ability of political communication to improve my own communication skills to get my message across more succinctly. This internship has increased my job marketability in that employers will be able to see this internship in political research and communication and recognize my enhanced research skills. These skills are very useful to employers because they demonstrate organization and a drive to find the most accurate information possible.
My knowledge of politics and government has expanded through this internship because it has exposed me to a wide range of female political figures who use a variety of communication styles. As most political courses in our discipline primarily involve men, I have learned more about how women interact with our political system. Specifically, I have gained more knowledge in what women choose to focus on while running for public office. For example, women on both sides of the political aisle mentioned family in at least one of their ads, whether it be rebuking a claim from their opponent saying they aren’t a good mother or reinforcing their image of being a family-oriented individual. This directly confirms with the information I have learned in coursework relating to the challenges women in politics face: there is an underlying expectation that women are or should be more family oriented, and the field of politics is therefore more traditionally suited for and occupied by men, since it consumes a significant amount of time. This belief is a reason why there are so few women compared to men involved in our political system. The fact that almost every single woman running for office has mentioned their family life at least once shows that women are aware of this and seem to try and conform to this belief because they know that it is how they will find the most political success.
I have also learned a lot about the qualifications that seem to be the most important when a candidate is running for office. In many ads, candidates highlighted their freshness to the political world and said that the fact that they have no prior experience shows that they are the best candidate for the job. This contrasts with what I have learned in class related to what makes a politician a good politician. My classes have emphasized the importance of climbing the political ladder and getting experience before running for national office, and have discussed the significance of being labeled a politician, because a politician is one who works in politics. However, candidates seem to distance themselves from being called a politician—one candidate going so far as to ridicule her opponent for having served in the House of Representatives before deciding to run for the Senate. This surprised me and caused me to wonder if political theory and expert analysis is always in sync with our changing social reality.
From my internship at the Catt Center archives, I have learned more about myself as a person and a political science major. I developed a passion for following election races and noting the communicative differences between women running for political offices. It was entertaining to hear and observe the different viewpoints from women running for office during an election year, especially how they projected their views to the country. I also was very interested and engaged while compiling speeches and ads from a female major-party presidential nominee, since there have been only two in American history. Despite the loss in the presidential race, I enjoyed seeing the successes for all the women I compiled ads and speeches for, regardless of political party. Transcribing and compiling their victory speeches was inspiring, and the number of victories I observed is an encouragement that women are finding more and more success in politics with each election.
The role of political representatives in the United States is an important one, since it is the most direct connection to creating change in the community through legislation. This internship expanded my knowledge of government and the role of elected representatives in society through the clear observations of the different issues that the candidates chose to focus on while running for office. I learned a lot about the unique issues in different states and how different candidates and parties planned to best remedy them. The ads and speeches I compiled showed that change looks different state-by-state, which highlights the significance of having representatives from each state be involved in the legislative process. Overall, this internship gave me a unique perspective on the inner workings of running a campaign and how to best communicate in order to be elected to public office.