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Legislative internship program gives a window into state’s political machine
- Ellie Ruel
- 2 minutes ago
- 17 min read
Students offer thoughts on state of Alaska and national politics, share experiences from the Capitol
By Ellie Ruel
Juneau Independent
Denali Zantop said she’s been told by family members that her earliest inkling of political engagement as a small child was constantly singing “Sister Suffragette" from the movie “Mary Poppins.” Now, she’s gotten the experience of carrying a bill through the Alaska Legislature.
“When I got to high school, I mean that really sparked my political interest, growing up around the Ferguson riots and things like that, and the BLM movement,” Zantop said. “Now I'm in Alaska and learning about fish politics, never thought that would be such a touchy issue in my life of living in the Midwest.”
The main project she worked on was carrying a bill that would require CPR education to be taught in schools through the House and Senate.
Zantop, a senior political science major at the University of Alaska Anchorage, was a legislative intern this spring for Sen. Elvi Gray-Jackson, D-Anchorage, through the Ted Stevens Legislative Internship program.
Participants earn 12 credits toward their degree while working full-time in a lawmaker’s office during the 17-week session in Juneau. Notable program alumni include Val Davidson, former Lieutenant Governor and current President/CEO of the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, and former U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola.
This year’s cohort consists of 12 students across the political spectrum and with varying majors — all of whom left with different perspectives about politics and their own futures.
Glenn Wright is a political science professor at the University of Alaska Southeast and has been in charge of the nearly 40-year-old program since 2011. He said the state’s unique composition makes the Alaska State Capitol an ideal training ground for those interested in how political cogs turn.
“We just have a really exceptional environment for this sort of thing in our Legislature, which is really unusual in that it is both a professional organization and also like a kind of small human-sized institution,” Wright said. “Students come into the program and they're working in these tiny offices in our Capitol building, where they might be working with a legislator and maybe two other staffers, or maybe if it's a really big office, there might be five or six people total. So they're kind of able to do all the stuff that legislative staff, especially entry-level legislative staff, would normally be doing.”
He also said one of his “sales pitches” for the program is that about 40% of students leave the building at the end of session with a job offer in hand. Over half of the 14-person cohort from last year worked in the building this session, Wright noted.
Lessons learned during the 34th legislative session
For Zantop, those duties entailed a lot of regular office fare — making coffee, checking emails and managing schedules. She also aided Sen. Gray-Jackson in the Senate State Affairs and Community and Regional Affairs committees.
“I'm kind of front desk in this office. Mostly my mornings are pretty much the same,” Zantop said. “If I have free time, my free time is filled with, ‘Oh, let me learn more about this bill,’ so I can tell the senator in case she has questions and things like that. It's sitting in with the senator for meetings and taking meeting notes and writing those.”
While most of her day winds up being research on a computer, she said she loves to “go on little deep dives.” Zantop said it’s also a social job, and she frequently checks in on other offices and their bills.
“You really do have to make friends in this building, even if you don't want to, you have to at least be friendly with everybody,” she said.
Zantop said she was the point person for Senate Bill 20, the bill mandating CPR be taught in schools.
“If anyone has questions, my chief of staff, Clark, will direct them to me,” Zantop explained. “Answering other officers' questions about anything. So, like today I had a bill hearing, and that was just getting the senator ready for it in case, letting her know any questions the committee members might have, or even staff members would have, creating that speech and having my super long list of potential questions that might be asked.”
In between hearings, she also “shopped” the bill inside and outside the building.
“A lot of it's even just education on people in the bills, because this bill would require CPR to be taught in schools,” she said. “There's obviously concerns for more rural districts of like ‘How are we going to find time to do this,’ so it's explaining ’Oh, this is what's going to happen, here's that,’ and just fully walking people through the bill.”
Many of the interns were assigned a bill to carry by their respective offices. While some, like Zantop’s CPR bill, didn’t carry a fiscal note and were policy-based, some dealt in economics and faced more pushback.
“My closest intern friends, they're both working for the House side, and one of them works for a member under the finance committee, and their experience is completely different than mine, even though their representative is actually in my senator's Senate district,” Zantop said. “I love hearing other interns even tell me about what they've been experiencing, what they're doing, even if they can't give me concrete details. It's like, ‘Oh, what do you do?’ Like, my friend's working on a right-to-repair bill, and hearing all of the prep work she's doing for that is really fascinating.”
That friend was Emma Sulczynski, interning for Rep. Maxine Dibert, D-Fairbanks. Sulczynski recently graduated from the University of Alaska Fairbanks with a Bachelor of Arts in political science. Carrying a bill through the Legislature was one of her goals going into the internship program.
“I did some really intensive research into all the right-to-repair bills on the books in other states and what it looked like,” Sulczynski said. “I learned about the right-to-repair movement, things like copyright law, and I presented the bill to the committee for the first time in this session, and was tasked with communicating about the bill, so having meetings with other offices to answer questions and help come to consensus. There were a lot of negotiation processes that I was a part of and was just responsible for the duties that came along with it, like filing the hearing packets and sending in all the documents before.”
Both the House bill sponsored by Dibert and its companion legislation in the Senate faced opposition from companies saying access to schematics for repairs went far beyond consumer electronics.
In response, the originally broadly applicable bill was narrowed to only technology after passing out of committee, which Sulczynski said was disappointing to see. Ultimately, the Senate version of the bill passed the Senate and stalled in the House Finance Committee.
“It was interesting when you would need to negotiate and who you would need to negotiate with,” she said. “Sometimes it was people that I wouldn't have expected that had problems, or sometimes people wouldn't try to negotiate with us at all, and would just propose their own amendments without talking to us about it, which from what I've come to understand is kind of against the common protocol in the building.”
Witnessing that experience and others left her both disheartened and encouraged. Sulcyzynski said she saw many passionate legislators try to make progress, but the sheer volume of issues and information — as well as other impediments to change — was discouraging.
The most poignant realization she walked away from the Legislature with was that “things are in much more dire shape” than she originally thought.
“We have this fiscal crisis on our hands and are struggling with budgeting, our schools are falling apart, and the bills are red,” she said. “It just seems like people are struggling to find ways to relieve the pressure right now, and that's motivating lots of things that go down there, and I had not realized the extent of our issues.”
Born and raised in Homer, Sulczynski said her motivation to pursue politics came from watching climate change firsthand. She used to gather mussels on the beach with family and friends to steam for dinner, but warming water temperatures and more frequent harmful algal blooms that can lead to paralytic shellfish poisoning stopped the tradition.
“There's just so many little things like that that have damaged our community over the years, and it's just such a large-scale problem that I think we should be addressing at the national level,” she said. “I think there are things we can do to make it better at the local level as well, and people aren't thinking about that as much because they're just thinking it should be passed upward, or that nothing should be done at all.”
After sitting in on resource committee meetings, she said she found the extraction-heavy focus difficult to contend with. Her research project topic was how legislators balanced resource extraction in Alaska.
“In our state constitution it says that the state has a mandate to both develop, utilize and conserve its resources for the maximum benefit of the people, so I thought maybe it would be more equally divided between these develop, utilize, conserve categories, but it was really heavily weighted towards the develop,” she said.
In the future she hopes to help shape policymaking in the state, but isn’t sure if it would be through the Legislature or a nonprofit. Over the last few months she added a fiscal facet to her beliefs, like many of her cohort who experienced a somewhat surprising economic crash course.
“I think that Alaska's nature as a resource extraction-based state that is incredibly dependent on oil and gas, and mining has prevented us from taking action on the environmental side,” she said. “People just see it as a limitation on an activity that we rely on, so it would be really great to shift the conversation not only to an environmental focus, but on a long-term sustainability for our state focus.”
Sulczynski said she came out of the internship experience with a lot of newfound knowledge as well as a sense of urgency. She also noted that topics focused on by lawmakers don’t always match the younger generations’ priorities.
“My generation, I think we're really focused on affordability and how we feel like we're being priced out of the right to live almost,” she said. “That's a huge concern as well as some human rights stuff in light of things happening globally, and I know not everyone has this as a priority, but younger people are more likely to believe in climate change and see it as a priority, and I think those lists are the things that could definitely be talked about more in the Legislature.”
Polling suggests younger generations typically feel more disenfranchised by political systems and identify less with political parties than older generations, and a 2025 youth poll by Harvard showed only 13% of young voters say the U.S. is headed in the right direction.
EJ Richards, a sophomore in interdisciplinary studies through UAS Sitka who interned with Rep. Rebecca Himschoot, I-Sitka, says those issues are rather prominent in Alaska.
“After seeing it from the inside, I'm going to be blunt, youth is not something that I feel is a high priority of the Legislature,” Richards said. “It's something I think, at least from my perspective as a youth, should be valued more, because the problem in Alaska is we're talking about outmigration, and how they need to develop the workforce in the state. Well, let them start in the state. I mean, the cost of living is nuts. You can't even move out of your parents' house or out of the basic house, it's so expensive. And so, ultimately, they need to provide the pieces for the youth to speak to actually develop and then stay and work in Alaska.”
He plans to possibly pursue teaching after getting his degree, and focused heavily on education issues during his time at the Capitol.
“I find it intriguing, just the politics of education, because a lot of people would think that education is something that should be nonpartisan, but it isn't,” Richards said.
He chose Himschoot’s office to work in after having her as an elementary school science teacher and staying in contact with her about student advocacy at Sitka High School. She represents Richard’s hometown and he said they were also ideologically matched.
“I was also just using her to kind of learn about the Legislature. I've been there before, and I was like, ‘What does this bill do? How does it relate to education?’” he said. “And she took the time to answer me, which I applaud, because that is really how you get youth involved in civics.”
For Richards, the teen mental health crisis was a driving force for his entry into the political field.
“We are statistically the worst in every statistic regarding teen mental health. It's rather grim,” he said. “I had a personal friend of mine that had, it was a pretty darn close call, and so that's something that ignited me and drove me to do this, because no one should feel like how he felt.”
The bill he carried through the Legislature would have increased per-pupil funding for residential schools, but stalled in the House Finance Committee.
“It's important to get in the funding increase because of the massively increasing cost of living that comes with housing students,” he said.
Much of his time was spent doing research, often as a result of constituent emails. Richards said one example involved a tangent investigating an Anchorage-based gubernatorial candidate proposing the use of the Palantir Foundry to optimize PFD returns.
Between carrying HB 380, research and constituent responses, Richards said his duties felt close to those of a full staffer, and he was able to be mentored by the more experienced staff along the way.
“It’s impressive how much freedom I was given as an intern,” he said. “It's also cool to say I'm contributing and it feels like I am contributing to the work that's been done in my office, maybe not as much as everyone else, but it still feels great.”
As a sophomore, he’s a younger student in the program, and it was one of his first times being away from Sitka and his family.
Aaron Rayhbuck recently graduated from the University of Alaska Anchorage with a bachelor’s degree in political science. He interned with Sen. Robert Myers, R-North Pole, for his senior year and falls on the other side of the age continuum as a mid-adulthood student.
He decided to go to college after years of working in retail, partially because of what he said was a mismatch between narrative and reality during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“These things didn't match the hysteria that I was being fed about the horrible danger, and how we're all going to die versus what I actually could see with my own eyes,” Rayhbuck said. “There was such a fundamental disconnect that it started to question the reality of what I was being told, and so that was the wake-up moment.”
For Rayhbuck, a political science degree was a way to kill two birds with one stone by combating career inertia and satisfying his curiosity about political systems. Now he’s hoping to continue working in the Legislature as a staffer or liaison.
“I realized that I really didn't understand all this politics stuff,” he said. “So I asked myself, ‘Well, how do you find out about this politics stuff,’ and I don't mean like read about it on Twitter, I mean like really understand it, like what's actually happening. How do I understand the fabric of my reality at a granular level? And so I thought, ‘Well, that's, in an academic sense, that's political science.’”
It wasn’t his first foray into the world of politics. After 9/11, he said he dug into American geopolitics and became active in antiwar protests against the Bush administration while he lived in California.
“I thought that looking at the thousands and thousands of people in the streets, I was like, ‘Oh, this is what the people want, this is real democracy. This is the people standing up and saying we're signaling to our government about what it is, about what the will of the people is, and our government's going to listen to us,’” he said.
After the protests weren’t successful in stopping military action, Rayhbuck said he moved on from politics until well after he moved to Alaska 11 years ago.
Now, coming out of a session working in the Capitol, he said some of his perspectives had shifted.
“I used to think that the goal should be to basically eliminate government as much as possible, and that is basically government bad, but now I think I've moderated that, I think,” he said. “We need the right kind of government. We need the right kind of institutional design, and that's something I've learned in the internship.”
He said that right now, the legislative and executive branches of state government aren’t aligned enough to make sweeping political changes, and balancing issues like education and the PFD are complex.
The bill Rayhbuck carried through the Legislature was a piece of compact legislation for the Rural Health Transformation Program.
“I really took it as an opportunity to learn about a new policy area,” he said. “In a way, it's a lot like undergrad, where every semester they'll have all these classes, and pretty much 95% of the time I don't know anything about these topics. So you've got a few weeks to learn about it, and then demonstrate what you've learned, and I feel like every committee meeting is like a different topic, and I have, instead of a few weeks, I've got a couple days.”
The interns were able to dive more deeply into issues during weekly three-hour seminar sessions after their workdays.
“We'll often be reading papers that speak to either big problems that Alaska is having as a state or big questions that exist in political science,” Wright said. “Then we'll be reading something that sort of connects those two things, and then we argue about it.”
Richards found those arguments to be “insightfully off-topic.”
“The three hours are brutal. I will tell you, but I value the time,” he said. “Sometimes a tangent will lead somewhere, and it's like I've never thought about it that way, and it's insightful.”
Sulczynski learned about how Alaska politics were shaped by its history in the seminars that she said she wouldn’t have gleaned from normal channels.
“How the creation of the PFD and the permanent funds in general have affected the state of Alaska's politics was a big one,” Sulczynski said. “I did learn about this in other classes, but it was interesting to get a different perspective on how our relationship with the Indigenous people here versus in other states' histories has been kind of unique.”
The cost of the internship and living in Juneau
The classwork portion of the program wasn’t as appealing to Rayhbuck, who said he’d covered most of the topics earlier in his degree program. More poignant an issue was the cost of the program, especially since he said most of his learning was self-directed.
“You're required to enroll as a full-time student at UAS, which is 12 credits, so that's about $4,500 once you factor in all the fees and stuff like that,” he said. “That’s fine because there's a stipend that comes with this internship, and that's great. However, when you put those two things together, you get about $2,000 to live in Juneau for about four months, so January, February, March and April. $2,000 is not going to cut it.”
While he was able to handle the financial burden with savings, he said it might be more difficult to accomplish as an early professional.
“I am super thankful for the stipend. I'm not going to say no to free money, but at the same time, it's like, of course, it's too small. I mean, like, you're always gonna ask for money. I mean, it's ridiculous to expect otherwise. It is like paying to get into politics,” Richards said. “I think the stipend is just a bigger message about how civic engagement to you needs to be more accessible.”
Sulczynski said she was lucky to stay on-campus covered by scholarships, but many people used most of their stipend for housing.
“With the basically affordability crisis of housing, cost of living, health care, all these things, it's really difficult for young people to get on their feet in the first place in any sector,” she said. “I think it's just becoming more difficult in general, and in politics, with how divided things are, and with how much money goes into them, especially as you go up levels from local to federal. It does provide a barrier to entry for people, I think, that can be a little difficult to get around.”
While the program came with its quirks, Zantop said a highlight was connecting with other interns about shared experiences and idiosyncrasies. Some of the cohort formed a legislative bowling league team dubbed the “Pinterns,” and others organized informal debates and regularly attended trivia nights together.
“I've made some really long-term friends here, just because they're interns,” she said. “We've all bonded over not getting a big enough stipend, we've all bonded over sitting for three hours after we're in a small committee room, not saying it's trauma bonding, but like it does create this experience of I really like these people.”
Alaska’s ‘politically intimate’ environment
Following months of experiencing the inner workings of the Legislature, many of the interns found Alaskan state politics to be an interesting foil to events on the national stage.
Wright said that ranked choice voting and bipartisan coalitions can make Alaska “amenable to public policy making.” That’s combined with what he calls a culture of sensible, thoughtful debate in the Legislature combined with a "professionalized" environment.
“It's not that people don't have ideology here, but just that the structures exist for them to sort of tune that into something that makes for political dialog, and hopefully more reasonable policy making,” Wright said.
Richards noted that while independent candidates are more likely to be voted into office, which might lead to fewer clashes due to party, there are still hardline issues with little compromise.
“I think it’s just polarized in a different way, not to say it’s as vulgar,” Richards said. “There's certain issues here that, like, you're just there's actually no compromise on it, like the PFD is one where there's people that will not vote for a smaller PFD, and vice versa.”
Zantop identified similar issues she said are rarely compromised on.
“Just the way Alaska's laid out, we kind of do have to prioritize different things,” she said. “I think the best example of that would be like the LNG pipeline. We are such a gas and oil heavy state that pretty much everybody is pro gas and oil, at least on the record and out in public. Same thing with guns, you know, almost everyone here is gonna say they're anti-gun control, and that's just because of the state we live in, and I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. I think it's good. I think moderation is what we need.”
Both Rayhbuck and Sulczynski noted that the state’s population lends a “politically intimate” environment.
“I think we are definitely affected by what's going on nationally and the partisanship and division on that level,” Sulczynski said. “But we're such a small state, like a small big state, everyone kind of knows each other, and I think our sense of community here helps us prevent it from being as divided and partisan as it is in other places where people can just avoid each other and stay in their own circles.”
Encouraging engagement
Each of them walked away feeling disenfranchised with elements of the system, but said there’s still some hope. While they faced barriers to entry during the internship due to the high cost of living and a small stipend, engaging younger generations in politics was a priority.
Zantop said she’s concerned about the future because she and her younger sister will have to live in it.
“My dad's 71 this year and he doesn't care about politics because it's not going to affect him. Meanwhile, I'm 22, I've got my cat to worry about, I've got my siblings to worry about,” she said. “Yeah, I do care about what their education policies are going to be like. Yes, I think they deserve to have lunch at school, and that's not to say the older generation doesn't care. I mean, I held a protest a few months ago and there were so many older people so, it's nothing against them, but I definitely think it'll be good to get younger people in politics.”
While carrying her CPR education bill, Zantop asked a local youth group she leads about it and tried to engage them in state civics. She also encourages her younger siblings to go to protests and listen to bill hearings.
“I would hope that we're pushing for our generation and generations to come, of like, you do need to pay attention to at least parts of this because if you learn one thing, if this person learns another thing, and we all come together, we can be informed, and we can learn about the process, and maybe not feel so disenfranchised by it,” she said.
Sulczynski said that engagement is worthwhile, as she watched constituent meetings and messages shape legislative priorities in the building.
“Politics is more accessible than some people might think,” she said. “You can call in and you can testify on all manner of things going on in the building. It's just a matter of keeping yourself up to date on what's happening, which can be difficult, but you can get involved in the process, and it's not as difficult or complex of a task as some people might think.”
• Contact Ellie Ruel at ellie.ruel@juneauindependent.com.
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