See my student job: Sigrid keeps track of a politician’s calendar

Name? Sigrid Friis Proschowsky
Subject? Political Science, 5th semester
Student job? Personal assistant for Danish MP Ida Auken
How long have you worked there? Since August 2016
How did you get the job? I have done a lot of voluntary political work – both in the Social Liberal Youth organisation and in the Social Liberal Party and had a good knowledge of the party as an organization. When the Social Liberal Party secretariat last Spring said they would hire four student assistants, I applied immediately! And I’m glad that I did.

A day at the student job

09.30 – Arrive at Christiansborg after a cold and windy bike ride and start, of course, with a café latte to start the day, before I open Outlook. I am responsible for Ida Auken’s calendar, so I start to check whether there should be changes to the programme of the day – moved meetings, switched rooms or things like this. This is not the case, so I start on the unread e-mails from one end.

09:57 – Talk to John from Danish TV station DR. Next week Ida is to take part in a ‘quiz with Signe Molde’ on DR2, so we need to sort out the practical details. He will make sure there are 20 extra chairs in the studio during filming – great! This means that I can invite people to come along, like some of the many cool volunteers who helped Ida with her election campaign in 2015.

10:35 – Andreas, one of the secretariat’s three semester trainees, dropped by my office to ask me to find a few idle moments in Ida’s calendar. He wants to record some small video sequences to be used in the communication about the SIRI Commission, one of Ida’s initiatives that hopes to identify DK’s ability to exploit developments in artificial intelligence and digitalisation to create growth and jobs.

11.30 – Delicious lunch in the café Snapstinget – I will never tire of it. I rarely cook for myself, so being pampered with Meyer’s buffet in here suits me very well. This means that I can just eat a slice of dark bread for supper.

13:27 – Time for the weekly status meeting with Ida. Here we sit together and look at the requests that have come in over the past week. If there are invitations for several events at the same time, we talk about which ones she should give priority to. We review next week’s calendar: When will the bill reach the floor of parliament? Which committee chairman speeches does Ida need to hold? Is there anything she needs to prepare for the coming week in the form of presentations or debate contributions? After the meeting I update the calendar based on the priorities we have made, and send out a lot of e-mails.

15.15 – Next week there are primary school pupils in Parliament. I check Ida’s calendar for the week to make sure that it’s OK to have two students as observers. I think that it’s a really cool concept – I would have loved to do something like this when I was at school.

15.50 – The latest invention of the Social Liberals is going live: ‘Do you know the type? We are all a bit Social Liberal’. Through an online generator you can upload pictures and create self-deprecating, humorous caricatures of yourself as a ‘self-satisfied traitor’ or a ‘multicultural humanist’ – you have to listen to a lot of this stuff when you are social liberal 😉

16.30 – There is a good atmosphere in the corridor about the new campaign. I enjoy my last latte (as I fit the cliché) and start going home.

uni-avis@adm.ku.dk

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