Poli-Shy
Many young Sagehens are fascinated by politics, but when it comes to a career, the choice is tougher.

By Peter Enzminger '08

Jacqueline Wong-Hernandez '04
Jacqueline Wong-Hernandez '04 grew up in Sacramento, but for her the political life was more a source of fascination than a future vocation. She majored in politics at Pomona “out of love of studying it, not out of a conscious intent to build a career in it.”

After graduating, she set off on a year-long Watson Fellowship, studying woman healers in Latin America, but quickly sensed she wasn’t cut out for solitary research. Upon her return, she plunged into a job in Oakland, Calif., with New Leaders for New Schools, recruiting principals—a way to make a tangible difference in society. Soon, though, she started to feel the pull of the bigger-picture impact: “There was always a part of me that was a policy nerd, and I wanted to figure out if policymaking was where my heart was.”

She returned to Sacramento to become a California Senate Fellow, working with the Budget Committee, which brings the challenging intellectual, and at times, ethical decision-making that goes into researching and recommending allocations for such programs as the state’s welfare system. “I like working in policy ... because policy questions revolve around the right thing to do. I try to turn my research into the best advice that I can give” to State Sen. Denise Moreno Ducheny ’74.

“A fellow Watson alum gave me some excellent advice,” Wong-Hernandez recalls. “She asked me if I was more comfortable moving a few people miles, or moving a million people inches. My husband is a fourth grade teacher; I work in the Senate. He doesn’t want more glamour, he wants fourth grade. As for me, I feel I need to do something bigger—but maybe it’s not bigger.”

Greg Carter ’10
Greg Carter ’10 stayed up until 4 a.m. to watch the election night results roll in for the cliffhanger Bush-Gore race of 2000. He was only 12 years old. The next presidential election, Carter, then a rising high school junior, leveraged a Little League baseball connection into backstage access to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where he worked as an assistant to the speech coach.

In subsequent summers, he held positions as the head page in the U.S. Senate, on then-Virginia Gov. Mark Warner’s political action committee and performed opposition research for the Democratic National Committee. Carter talks excitedly about meeting Sen. Hillary Clinton (much warmer in person) and Sen. Barack Obama (sang Stevie Wonder songs in the green room) after a January debate in Hollywood’s Kodak Theater.

Nonetheless, Carter is wary of “getting sucked in” to Beltway politics. “I don’t want to turn into that because at some point you stop making contributions to the political system. I would much rather continue in my education, do something real with my life, and then get back into politics, as a behind-the-scenes guy,” says Carter. “There is a chance that my love of politics will indeed suck me in, but I would really rather do some substantive policy work instead of just running campaigns.”

And if he does wind up in campaigns? “I don’t want to be working for people who I think are scum.” His goal will be to “find people who actually inspire.”

Rachel Pelham ’10
Rachel Pelham ’10 knew plenty—maybe too much—about politics, having grown up in Vermont’s capital of Montpelier, where her mom is a lobbyist and her dad a former state legislator. But this year she got caught up in the excitement of the primary campaign, and, at 20, she will certainly be one of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s youngest delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

Her inspiration came during an informal talk put on by the Politics Department. Professor Susan McWilliams told the students, “‘You know anyone can be a delegate, even you could run,’” recalls Pelham, a politics major. “I was totally taken aback because we are all so used to observing the political process from a distance. It doesn’t often occur to us that we can do more than just vote and watch the results roll in on TV.”

It helped that the caucus to choose delegates from the area’s congressional district was held on the Scripps College campus, making it easier for Pelham’s student supporters to turn out for her. There was some surprise from local Democrats at Pelham’s age, but she says, “This year has seen a wave of young people running to go to the convention, and I think we are going to have an unusually strong presence this year. I’m very excited.”

Is she in it for the long haul? Pelham earlier had foresworn the political life “because all the strategy and pandering is definitely a turn-off.” Now, she concedes, “I’m really torn between law school and life in the public sector. There’s just a lot of room in politics to make a difference.”