Explore America interns spend summer in D.C. at Brookings Institute

Emma Sager ’27 and Amanda Campino ’28 are spending their summer in Washington, D.C., interning at the think tank’s Race, Prosperity, and Inclusion Initiative housed within the Governance Studies program.

Add “Brookings Institute intern” to the growing résumés of Emma Sager ’27 and Amanda Campino ’28. This summer, they are working with the Race, Prosperity, and Inclusion Initiative (RPII) at Brookings through the Washington College Starr Center Study for the American Experience’s Explore America Summer Internship program.

This is the second year for the Explore America partnership with Brookings. Among the roughly 50 interns Brookings has this summer, Sager and Campino are the only ones at RPII.

“Brookings being the leading think tank for public policy was super exciting for me because I one day want to work in public policy. It’s a really good opportunity to be in a field I’m already interested in,” said Campino, an anthropology and political science double major.

The two are working on two main projects this summer with RPII. One is fact-checking and copyediting blog posts for Uprooted: Rediscovering American History, released quarterly.

“We’re getting to see the beginning stages and everything that has to go into posts that will go up in the fall,” Sager said.

The other project is one RPII has been working on for several years regarding data governance. Sager and Campino are sorting transcripts of RPII’s meetings with various stakeholder groups, tagging and coding time stamps for specific talking points. The project will ultimately make the data available to the public and include a comprehensive policy suggestion. By making the database sortable by key word in this way, users will see how conversations have evolved between meetings.

“They’ve been discussing sets of questions, getting a feel for how those groups are doing data governing, trying to understand how Brookings would like to do it. It’s an exchange of information,” Campino said.

“It’s interesting to see how all the pieces fit together,” Sager said. “The work we’re doing is giving a more comprehensive and cohesive understanding of how a meeting that happened a year ago is connected with a meeting coming up in two months.”

This kind of data analysis takes foundational skills Sager and Campino learned in their classrooms and applies them in new ways specific to Brookings’s needs.

“I came into the internship thinking it was going to be a little bit more quantitative analysis, but it’s been exciting,” Campino said. “Being able to have a body of work that I can point to and say, ‘I can analyze public policy’ will help me in the long run.”

Sager and Campino take not only these copyediting and data analysis projects with them after their internship ends. Their final project for the summer is to co-author, alongside a Brookings fellow, articles on topics that interest them. Those articles will eventually appear on RPII’s How We Rise blog.

“Our bosses want us to get experience in a lot of different types of work,” Sager said.

Campino hopes to focus her project on housing and policies affecting unhoused populations, like hostile architecture—the design of public spaces to guide behavior and use of those spaces. Sager hopes to explore women’s access to abortion and contraceptives in rural communities in the South.

“Any sort of writing and analysis is going to benefit me going into law school,” Sager said. A double major in history and economics, Sager plans to pursue a career in contract law. “Brookings is about policy recommendations. I want to work on the other end of that spectrum: things that are already in place and how they should be applied and carried out [in] the way that helps people the way they are intended.”

Sager said the internship gave her a new appreciation for the thinking and process that goes into how laws and policies are developed, enacted, and eventually implemented. She said one of the things she’s most excited for is coming back to campus in the fall to put all she’s learned from the internship into practice in the classroom.

For her part, Campino says the Brookings internship is “a dream opportunity.” She has taken advantage of attending events hosted by Brookings throughout her internship, and she noticed a common foundation: even though public policy can get messy and bureaucratic, the people working on it really are striving to best serve the public.

"It’s really exciting to be exposed to that sort of dialogue. Every panel I’ve been to, the panelists always bring it back to what’s best for the public,” Campino said. “Something I want to learn and take from them is making sure we’re keeping our eye on the prize of what the public needs and wants.”

Experiences like the Brookings insternship are made possible through additional funding from the Louis L. Goldstein Program in Public Affairs and the Libby & Douglass Cater Society. 

— MacKenzie Brady '21