UCLA SPG: What motivated you to pursue a career in policy?

ZG: Although I was always open to Academia, I didn’t go into grad school super committed to Academia like a lot of people are. I love neuroscience and I love research, but I think eventually that passion that I had for neuroscience transferred to policy. I loved all the projects we got to do with Science Policy Group, and the impact you can have with policy.

I chose the CCST fellowship because California is such a wild place to be involved in policy. On one hand, it's huge—California is the fifth largest economy in the world, and there's room for such expansive policy. On the other hand, Sacramento itself is relatively small, so you can really get to know people and the political atmosphere can be somewhat less contentious. CCST is a great foot in the door for PhD scientists to get involved in policy because the program has been around a while, and it is highly regarded among legislators.

UCLA SPG: What was the application and interview process like for CCST?

ZG: Applications for the CCST fellowship are due by the end of February and the interview process lasts through May. When I applied, I did it with the mentality of “if I don't get in, I can definitely do another year of grad school.” When I did get in, I had an insane summer of trying to write everything up and finish my dissertation. The fellowship started November first, so I only had a few weeks to decompress before going right into my fellowship. I think that's also partly why I wanted to be in a personal office instead of a committee, because committee placements tend to be a bit more writing and I had just spent so many months writing nonstop. I definitely wanted the experience of being involved in all aspects of the leg, which is what I imagined a personal office to be.

The interview process for CCST was a bit of a blur. You have at least 2 interviews and some writing assignments. The last round was a Zoom interview with a panel of interviewers who ask you some questions about your research and why you want to do the fellowship. After that, you find out rather quickly if you got the fellowship or not.

My impression of the CCST application was that if you're applying, you're smart. You probably can do the job, so what you bring to the table in terms of your personality and lived experiences are important. Obviously what policy activities you've been involved in is also important, but I think CCST is very cognizant that not everyone has the same opportunities. We have a great Science Policy Group at UCLA, so we have a lot of opportunities to engage in policy projects. But if you're at a university that doesn't have those opportunities, I don't think they would necessarily penalize people for that. I do think, though, that when we started SPG in 2016 there were very few science policy groups. NSPN didn’t even exist yet! So I think the landscape of science policy has changed rapidly; there are all these organizations and groups you can join now to get involved. I'm sure applying to fellowships like CCST is going to get more competitive as applicants have more policy experience.

UCLA SPG: How do Fellows get placed in specific offices, committees, or departments?

ZG: There are several different types of placements. One option is to be placed on a committee, which will be focused on one subject: the Housing Committee, for example. Committee positions can be either in the Assembly (California's version of the House of Representatives) or the Senate. A second option is to be in personal offices, where you're staffing a member of the Senate or Assembly and working on a range of issues. You can also now be placed in the executive branch, for instance in specific departments. For example, we had a fellow who was in the Department of Insurance, working on climate risk assessment stuff. What you do in the fellowship will vary depending on your placement.

There are always more offices than there are fellows, so every fellow gets an office. At the beginning you have a quick interview with every office, and then you narrow down who you're really interested in, and the offices indicate who they're interested in. Then you have longer interviews with those offices. It's very intense, but also kind of fun because it feels a little more like a two-way street than typical interviews. Science fellows can be in high demand and––from what I understand––have a pretty great reputation in the California legislature because we tend to be effective in our positions.

After the interviews, you and the offices will rank each other in a matching process. CCST is really good at the matching process. They have an incredible track record for taking care of their fellows; they really care that you like your placement, and if you don't like it, there are things that can be done so that you have a good experience, but that doesn’t happen very often. They know the offices very well and this helps them guide their choices to make sure you end up with a good fit, because in the end the fellowship is about mentorship and professional development (you're going to get the skills no matter what placement you get!).

UCLA SPG: What policy issues do you work on?

ZG: Mostly bills involving education, mental health, and the environment. The Senator was very involved in mental health and adolescent mental health education. In terms of issue areas that I staffed, there were a lot of environment-adjacent areas. Also judiciary, which was fun, and insurance.

For the CCST fellowship, they're adamant about not wanting to place people in offices where they're going to be only focused on their subject matter expertise because they want people to get a well-rounded experience of what it's like to be in the legislature. However, if you’re a climate scientist and your PhD thesis was on like water or energy, I think it's pretty easy to find a placement in a committee or an office in the California government where that’s still your area of focus.

UCLA SPG: Please describe a typical day as a CCST Fellow.

ZG: Working in the legislature is completely seasonal; it’s all about deadlines. There’s a deadline when bill proposals need to be submitted, there's a deadline when committee backgrounders must be submitted, there are deadlines for when the legislature itself can introduce new bills or committees can meet. Your daily activities really depend on what month you’re in.

When you start your fellowship in December or January, your office is coming up with and submitting bill ideas to Legislative Counsel, who are the lawyers that draft the language of the bill. You’re also having a lot of meetings with people who have bill ideas and developing your own ideas and language with the Member, their Chief of Staff, Legislative Director, and other people in your office.

Then you shift to working on those bills, which is a lot of work with people in committees because once you introduce a bill, it goes to the committees that pertain to that bill. These committees evaluate the policy, so you need to be putting together packages of background information for them. If the bill has sponsors, you’ll be working with them and the committees to figure out if you need amendments or not. While your bills are going through committees, you are also working a lot on talking points for your boss because they’re going to be presenting these bills.

If you're staffing your boss on the committees that they sit on, you'll be preparing for and taking meetings for those bills that are heard in their committees. My boss was the chair of the Appropriations Committee, so when appropriations is happening, which is much later, we're taking meetings with constituents and other offices almost nonstop, because people are advocating for certain bills.

When the bills are finally being heard on the floor, your day is mostly analyzing the bills of the other offices that are going to be up for a vote, so that you can brief your boss. You end up having a lot of meetings then, too, because different stakeholder groups are meeting with you to advocate for the bills they care about. When your office’s bills are being heard on the floor, you're trying to get vote counts, and seeing who will support your bill and who won’t. All the while, your boss is doing events, so you'll be writing talking points for those.

The legislative session ends at the end of August, so those last couple of weeks are insane. Sessions will go really late into the night (or morning) and you're doing a lot of last-minute scrambling those weeks. 

After the legislative session ends, if it is an election year, a lot of people end up working for a campaign from September to early November. In this case, you are phone banking or traveling and knocking on doors for your candidate. Because my degree is in decision making and behavioral economics, I'm super interested in messaging and communications, and I got to work on some of the messaging with the Senate Dems. I also went to the Central Valley to help with an election there, since that's where a lot of competitive races are in California, both federally and for the state. But it has to be totally separate from your job in the Member’s office— you can’t even say the word “campaign” in the office. So if we’re in the office and the Senator asked how my week was, I couldn't say, “I was in Bakersfield doing campaign stuff.” Working on campaigns is a bit of a different vibe because you’re not in the office— very amicable and fun. If you aren’t campaigning, those are pretty slow months until things pick back up in the legislature in November and December.

UCLA SPG: What is your favorite part of your job?

ZG: I really love policy writing. Science writing is a slog; you need so many citations. It’s not that policy writing needs to be less rigorous or less researched, but your writing has a different purpose and audience. You still need all the background data, but you don't need to write it up. You just need to have it handy. If you’re writing a fact sheet, it’s just a page or two. You can put in more background and data when you’re writing for the committees. But it's not a paper; it's background information for people to understand your reasoning behind this bill. 

I also liked meeting with stakeholders and constituents. I loved hearing about people’s experiences, and I had a lot of meetings with groups involving kids, which is always really touching. The fact that you can meet with your representatives is a great part of the American political system. Being a part of that feels very meaningful.

UCLA SPG: What is your least favorite, or most surprising, part of your job?

ZG: The Zoom of it all! From what I understand, the capitol is not the same place it used to be pre-COVID. There used to be a lot more people coming around in-person. We were also in a different location, called the swing space, because they're currently renovating the actual capitol building. I think it would have been very cool to be in the actual capitol building with everyone coming into the office all the time. It’s just something I feel would have been fun to experience.

Sometimes you do get phone calls from people who are being super rude. It's not personal, but if you get a lot of those calls it can be grating. The people in my office were so great and supportive that it counteracted the negativity, but I think if you're already in a challenging work environment, that kind of angry feedback from the public would be very difficult.