At Georgetown, the pressure to intern at Capitol Hill—or “hilltern”—runs high.
More paid congressional interns come from Georgetown than any other higher education institution except American University and University of California, according to a 2019 report by non-profit Pay Our Interns.
Many Georgetown students, particularly those majoring in government or related fields, feel an expectation to complete a hillternship during their time on the Hilltop, said Suzie Ahn (CAS ’26), who interned for Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.) during the summers of 2024 and 2025.
“People are surprised if you don’t do one when you’re doing Government or [International Politics],” Ahn said.
Students who work these coveted internships find that they are often surrounded by misconceptions around their job. Mira Banker (CAS ’27), who worked for Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) in the spring of 2025, said that many of her peers believe that students hilltern just for the sake of hillterning, rather than a desire to tackle policy issues on a congressional team.
“I think a lot of people see it as a Georgetown preppy rite of passage,” Banker said.
But for Banker, hillterning came with significant pressure and responsibility. Even administrative tasks typically assigned to interns, such as answering phone calls, are not always as simple as they sound, Banker said.
According to Banker, there’s an emotional aspect to many of these tasks. For example, she said that during phone calls, she often witnessed policy’s immediate effects.
“It’s definitely hard to walk into work and see that people are losing their health care. Single mothers are calling in and saying they can’t feed their kids,” Banker said. “As a hilltern, you have literally no say in what’s gonna happen higher up. It’s like having a front row seat of the slowest car crash of your life.”
Ahn said that her internship reached a peak pressure point when Congress approved the Trump administration’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act in July, which passed a sweeping set of tax breaks, budget cuts, and Medicaid restrictions.
“There were some days when every two seconds, a new phone call would come in,” Ahn said.
But Ahn’s job wasn’t limited to just picking up the phone—another common assumption about hillterns.
“A misconception is you’re doing grunt work,” Ahn said. “I went to briefings or hearings and would write up policy memos for the staffer.”
Sometimes the identity of the office a hilltern is working for can add even more pressure, beyond the work itself. Students living in states whose representatives do not always align with their political beliefs face unique challenges. Isaac Kim (CAS ’26), who interned for Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.) in the fall of 2024, said that finding an office that represents his home state of Louisiana’s political complexity has been difficult.
“If you want to work for a blue office and you’re from Louisiana, you have very limited options,” Kim said. “A lot of people from Louisiana don’t fit neatly into any political spectrum, being a rural Cajun state, and that is something you have to navigate.”
Like Kim, Dechen Atsatsang (SFS ’26) dedicated considerable time to her internship search, looking for a position that suited her interests. She considered positions at the State Department, though she ultimately chose to intern at the Select Committee on the CCP, a special committee in the House of Representatives focused on bipartisan solutions to American economic and security competition with the People’s Republic of China. She said the internship helped focus her career path.
“I first came in really wanting to do foreign service at some point in my life, and I still think that is true, but I realized that it doesn’t necessarily have to be through one pathway,” Atsatsang said.
Atsatsang said that congressional internships can help students hone their interests in policy spheres, but they must be intentional about how they approach the process.
“People tend to apply to dozens of internships on the Hill and then tend to not hear back,” Atsatsang said.
Atsatsang approached her internship search with intentionality and she believes that paid off in both her experience and her success in the application process.
“In my opinion, it’s better to just apply to a few that you are really committed to and are passionate about,” Atsatsang said. “Being more intentional with what you want to do based on your interests—I think that comes across in the applications.”
Kim agreed that choosing an internship personalized to the student can make or break their experience.
“A hillternship is very much what you make of it,” Kim said. “Most offices are very willing to put your interests in mind, as long as you have the courage to ask.”
