Prioritizing the public in public service
Answering constituent calls as a summer intern in the Fair Lawn, New Jersey, congressional district office of Democratic U.S. Rep. Josh Gottheimer was anything but mundane for senior Jack DeKorte. People called with questions about immigration, social security, the Internal Revenue Service, expedited passport renewals — even how to get into their Facebook accounts. But DeKorte said the most memorable call came at 9:15 a.m. in mid-June, a few weeks into his internship.
“The caller asked, ‘Can you help me get out of Israel?’” he recalled. “I asked him for his email address, and he replied, ‘Hold on while I move into a bomb shelter.’”
During the next few days, Gottheimer’s congressional district office was bombarded with calls from frantic U.S. citizens trying to flee Israel as its Twelve-Day War with Iran ramped up. The State Department sent the office a database and directions on how to help citizens get flights out of Israel.
“My job was to monitor our 50 to 60 cases, many of those for multiple people,” the Wyckoff, New Jersey, native said. “I reached out to anyone I hadn’t heard from in the last 48 hours. Over a four-week period, we got everyone home safely. It was moving to be a part of something with real-world implications.”
Although not all his interactions with Gottheimer’s constituents were so high stakes, the leadership studies and political science major said he found the variety of interactions interesting and relevant to his anticipated career in public sector law.
“In a world where it seems many politicians are screaming at the TV,” DeKorte said, “it was eye-opening to see how much one of them did to help his constituents behind the scenes. Josh’s policy is ‘never say no,’ so we tried to assist every constituent who contacted us.”
One especially poignant example of this level of commitment came when Gottheimer helped the son and daughter-in-law of a late World War I veteran get their father’s long-lost medals: a Purple Heart and a World War I Victory Medal and Victory Button. The veteran had survived being shot and gassed during his World War I service.
“On a Friday afternoon, we told a few press outlets that the family would receive the medals on Monday morning,” DeKorte said. “By 10 a.m., Monday, 10 or 11 media stations were in our office to cover the event. It was really moving to see how much it meant to the family when Josh presented the Purple Heart, America’s oldest military medal.”
“This summer I got to see leadership from the inside, while helping a lot of people in my home district,” he said. He added that he was grateful to have received the Jepson School of Leadership Studies’ Burrus Fellowship to support his credit-bearing internship.
Research is yet another way DeKorte explores his interest in democratic governance. Last year, with the help of leadership studies professor Bo Yun Park, he and Kate Chasin, ’26, a leadership studies and philosophy, politics, economics, and law (PPEL) major, started designing a survey they will use to test the impact of generative AI on the 2024 congressional campaigns. Currently, DeKorte is researching a senior honors thesis on a related topic, with Park serving as his faculty advisor.
“My thesis will look at the relationship between populist political campaigning and social media,” he said. “I believe the algorithms used in social media create the right conditions for populist messaging to move people. Even if you don’t like the use of AI and social media in campaigns, you gotta jump on the ship, or you’ll drown.”