Sophomore Tommy Smith shares experience
interning for Speaker of the House Mike Johnson
Sophomore Tommy Smith knows how to tell a story. Every evening, his classmates look forward to his re-enactment of the most memorable call he received that day.
“This is Speaker Johnson’s office. How can I help you?”
“Yes ma’am, we do.”
“No ma’am.”
“Certainly not ma’am!”
“Well thank you for the call, I’ll be sure to let the speaker know.”
Senior Noah Parlee always finds these re-enactments hilarious.
“I love how he pulls out his ‘polite voice’ for the imaginary phone calls,” Parlee said.
When Smith submitted his application for the Washington-Hillsdale Internship Program last fall, he didn’t expect to be working for Speaker of the House Mike Johnson by this spring.
“I am an English major and not very politically driven,” Smith said. “But the coordinator for the program, Mary Wheeler, recommended that I apply to the speaker’s office, and I somehow got an interview and heard not long after that I was accepted.”
Johnson, currently in his fourth House term representing Louisiana’s fourth congressional district, took office as speaker of the house last October.
“He’s a very humble man who genuinely cares about the people who he serves,” Smith said. “You can see that in the way he carries himself and the conviction he has for good moral decisions in his politics.”
Smith now spends 8 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. every day answering the phone, giving tours, and escorting guests to their meetings with Johnson.
“Mr. Johnson has an incredible amount of responsibility as speaker of the house, so our job as interns is to take care of all the little things that he shouldn’t have to worry about,” Smith said. “Sometimes that’s just straightening chairs or restocking fridges, but other times we are doing projects directly for the Speaker.”
Mary Wheeler ’22, who serves as the undergraduate program coordinator for Hillsdale in D.C., said she has enjoyed working with Smith this semester.
“He’s very personable, which makes him immediately likable,” Wheeler said. “I’m not surprised he’s been chosen for some pretty cool opportunities.”
Smith said within the past few weeks in the Capitol, he heard Andrea Bocelli sing, walked past Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and spoke to Jordan Peterson.
“You walk past these important and famous people on a daily basis, and you start to realize that they are just regular people too,” Smith said. “You walk past them, they walk past you.”
Yet along with that, Smith said embarrassing moments are an inevitable part of being in a new environment.
“I’ve emailed a finished project to the wrong Jay, escorted a guest to the wrong Josh, and messed up cleaning the coffee machine so badly that nobody could figure out why it was leaking,” Smith said.
When asked how busy he feels in D.C. compared to normal student life back in Hillsdale, Smith laughed.
“There is a lot to do,” Smith said. “Not only are you taking two to three classes in the evenings after work, you are also shopping for your own meals. Most students are doing meal prep on the weekends based on their schedule for the upcoming week.”
Smith said he loves the challenge.
“I think there is this conception among students at Hillsdale that you will be missing out on things if you go on WHIP, and that is true to an extent,” Smith said. “But the opportunities that you get, and the experience of understanding how the political capitol of our world works, both make the sacrifice worth it.”
Smith also said WHIP is not solely a political internship program.
“There are over 700 Hillsdale alumni in the D.C. area, so if you tell the program directors what you are looking for, they will help you find an internship,” Smith said. “Hillsdale also just has a really good reputation on Capitol Hill, and people in D.C. always want Hillsdale students working for them.”
While the students on WHIP spend most of their time apart at their various internships, classes and the occasional social event brings them together.
“They took us to a Viennese Waltz recently, a black-tie tuxedo event with professional waltzers,” Smith said. “I was so bad at waltzing that the person who I asked to dance stopped me a minute in and said, ‘You know what, don’t worry about it.’”
Wheeler said a student on WHIP had given waltz lessons to her classmates a few times before the event.
“I guess Tommy didn’t attend any of the practices,” she said.
Smith said WHIP students learn the value of a hard day’s work. They won’t be able to coast through classes on WHIP when they have worked a full day and cooked meals before even getting to the classroom.
“There is an external responsibility that is placed on you that you don’t have in Hillsdale,” Smith said. “It is very easy to take a Hillsdale education for granted, especially when you are there for four years. When you come to D.C., you realize how valuable that education is, and it makes you value whatever you have left of it so much more.”
