Hey everyone,
My name is Jaimie Thai, and I am currently a Junior at USF studying politics and history. As a McCarthy Fellow, I hope to gain a multitude of different professional skills during my tenure here at the Public Utilities Commission. One of my primary goals was to network, and after being in Sacramento for a handful of weeks, it has been really fun meeting new people!
At the PUC, I was first assigned to go through different decisions of the PUC's distributed generation programs and condense the hundred or so paged decisions into 2 paged fact sheets. I have also assigned to update the bill tracking list everyday which is the basis of our weekly staff meetings. I recently finished compiling a list of all PUC's required reports to legislature and finding all of the reports that we actually been attending to. The most exciting thing that I have been working on is staffing AB 509. Aside from my assignments, I have attending many meetings with Ed and Dan with different lobbyists representing several different organizations. The primary focus of these meetings are about language of bills and amendments that said bills need to adopt in order for parties to be satisfied. I have attended the utilities and commerce committee hearing with the staff here, and it was definitely cool to see my supervisors speak to testify to the committee board.
The most suprising thing that I have learned about the legislative process thus far is definitely the importance of language. Being at the PUC, it seems as though much of the office's energy is about language of bills and how it affects us as the overseerers and the ratepayers. Because of this stress on language that I have been exposed to, going to the policy committee hearing and listening to the senators discuss the importance of language and how whatever bill that was up for discussion needed something added or erased from the bill has really exposed me to words can be so easily interpreted into different ways. I have also noticed this importance of language as I am working on communicating with staff in the PUC's office in San Francisco, as one sentence in the bill I am working on determines whether or not the PUC will oversee the submittal of notifications by utilities to ratepayers or if the PUC will be in charge of all aspects of notification.
I definitely assumed that as an intern, they would make me do more menial tasks such as making copies, fetching coffee, etc. It has been great to learn that they want to give me meaningful work that will benefit my learning experience and their office as a whole. I really appreciate that Ed and Dan have taken the time after every single meeting that I attend with them to essentially debunk everything that happened during the meeting so that I can have a better understanding of what is going on. I didn't expect to be hit with so many acronyms, but I have definitely been catching on lately.
The best part of my job is the exposure that I'm getting to policy. Ed sat down with me the other day to help me understand how to read a bill, and it's been really interesting to be the one in charge of tracking bills that the PUC has interest in because I can see the status of different bills changing over the week. Staffing the bill has been very interesting as I have to constantly contact our legal team in San Francisco to continuously keep them in the loop with what is going on regarding the bill here! It has definitely been fun to feel like I am in charge of something (even though it is something small!)
Hope everyone is doing fabulous!
Jaimie
