Whereas most people think they need to pick a college major that will lead to their career, Rebecca Benn chose to study literature and education mainly to immerse herself in things she enjoyed. Of course, her career on Capitol Hill, both on the staff side and now on the lobbying side, has used both. Find out how defining yourself not by what you do but what you love can be a very good policy.
Guest Rebecca Benn was excited to meet new people at college since she had been with the same small handful of schoolmates in her Mississippi Catholic school for her entire upbringing. Despite the welcome diversity of experiences of that she saw in her college friends, however, she also recognized similarities in values and inquisitiveness. She immersed herself in making deep friendships and in subjects that brought her enjoyment, namely English literature and education. She didn’t think these would necessarily be building blocks to a specific career path but pursued them out of interest.
When a fellowship to work on Capitol Hill took her to Washington, DC, she immediately felt comfortable in what she considered an approachable city. But she had so many other interests she didn’t figure she’d stay forever. The ability to work in a number of different subject areas and make many close friends ended up keeping her in the nation’s capital for her entire career. She has been careful, though, not to tie her identity too closely to the work—either when she was a staffer on the Hill or now that she is a lobbyist.
In this episode, find out from Rebecca how defining yourself not by what you do but by what you love can be a very good policy.…on today’s Roads Taken with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode's Guest
Rebecca Benn is a Mets fan, red wine drinker, music lover and ready accomplice for a winning happy hour or brunch in Washington, D.C. She’s also a partner at bipartisan lobbying firm Ballard Partners where she continues to advise both government and corporate decision makers on a wide range of policy issues.
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Rebecca Benn: This is a town that everybody is very focused on the job, their career, what's next, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's great. But I think I have survived this long, frankly, and [am] still happy doing what I'm doing because I have other interests.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: Whereas most people think they need to pick a college major that will lead to their career, Rebecca Benn chose to study literature and education main to immerse herself in things she enjoyed. Of course, her career on Capitol Hill, both on the staff side and now on the lobbying side, has used both. Find out how defining yourself not by what you do but by what you love can be a very good policy…on today’s Roads Taken, with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Today, I'm here with Rebecca Benn and we are going to talk about lobbying for what is needed and advocating for things that are good and right. And trying to figure out what that even is. Rebecca, thanks so much for being with us.
RB: Thanks for having me.
LJR: All right. So I asked the same two starting questions of all my guests and they are these: when we were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become? So great questions. So I think of myself as when I started college, I was thrilled to be. I'm from a really small town in Mississippi. I graduated with 42 people from a Catholic high school. I know. As much as I love being from Mississippi—and I'm from a really supportive, loving family, I'm really close to my parents, my sister, to this day—I really wanted a different experience. I wanted to meet probably more people considering I graduated with 42 people. And to add to that, I started first grade through 12th with 20 of those 42. So, I mean, we knew each other, right? Like, there were no secrets. So it was just exhilarating for me to go to college in New Hampshire from Mississippi, to go to this idyllic campus. I mean, I just fell in love with it when I visited it. And by the way I visited in February, which I had never experienced winter like that, or really seen snow like that. So I knew it was real, right? Like I trusted my instincts and loved it. So I was so happy and excited, but I sort of think of myself as like a dumb, sweet little puppy, you know? I just had no concept of what it would be like to be on my own. Probably like as excited as I was, and as confident as I felt, I don't think I really recognized it until a few months under the first term, like, oh my God, I'm here. I'm making decisions on my own. Thankfully my freshman year roommate, Leanne Armano and I and one of my best friends to this day Jen Withers, lived down the hall. They kind of took me under their wing and taught me like how to dress for winter, how to layer. And what's so great about, I think about their college experience and particularly Dartmouth for me, I shared a very similar worldview with those two, but like Leanne's from New York, Jen was from Massachusetts. So we were from different places, had different experiences, went to different types of schools, right? Different from some family experiences, but we still really bonded, right? I mean, that's like the beauty of the college. So that's, that's kind of who I was at the beginning. Just inexperienced, naive. I think that's probably what you get from a lot of people.
LJR: Yeah. Yeah. But, so how did you find yourself? Who were you as we progressed through?
RB: I majored in English, minored in education. And I have always loved reading and literature and, you know, from the head and the William Faulkner and Eudora Wealty, so it's pretty hard to miss. So I really enjoyed my English major. And I think about now, like the traditional, like Shakespeare class, right. I still have my Shakespeare tome on my books. I think about professor cooks African-American literature and class. I took a modern fiction class that like blew my brain when I was, I think, a junior. Like I remember those things certainly. And they still need a lot to me obviously. Cause I can name off the top of my head to you now. But honestly, it's the relationships. It's just a really close friendships that are the most meaningful to me. And I really think helped to guide me to be the person that I am today.
I often tell sort of younger staff or the younger folks who ask me for it, but like career advice that, you know immediately when you walk into sort of a professional situation, the type of people that you want to be around, right? Like you understand that you start to get a feeling for the culture. And that is really important. That's almost as important to me as the actual work that you're going to do. And I mention that because when I think about college, learning to work with different types people from different backgrounds and work by I mean like figuring out where your middle lunch is at the Hop or at Collis. Right? Like, I mean, but really it's like those negotiating things just as you're going through sort of all those hard conversations about who you are, right? When you're 18, 19, 20. Who you think you want to be. And maybe that ends up happening. And maybe it doesn't. I mean, I wasn't one of those people who thought I would be an English teacher or anything. I just knew I loved reading and writing and analyzing. That's what I loved. I didn’t go through my coursework and think that that would be my future. So for me, it was always a process of learning how to think and learning how to become the sort of person I wanted to be. And the relationships I think played just as big a role for me as my coursework.
LJR: Yeah. Did you feel any urgency to have figured out who that person was that you'd become by the end of that four years? Or were you kind of like, oh, I'm on a journey.
RB: No. It was definitely not an I’m on a journey and my, and my parents. I mean, I'm from. You know, straight up middle-class everybody works in my house upbringing. Like it wasn't like a, Rebecca's going to be, you know, leave Dartmouth and go to the south of France and think about who she's going to be. It was definitely a, I knew I needed to channel that obviously into a career. Right. Like I, I knew that that was never unclear. And I honestly, this is retrospect purely just me thinking now…those conversations with best friends and roommates at 2:00 AM while eating EBAs, was just as important for me, right. And helping me figure out who it was going to be as being in Professor Binswanger’s Ed20 class. Right. You get a TA that I hold them in equal way that I don't know if everyone feels that way. And I only bring this up because I hope people feel. Comfortable if that's the case. Cause it's okay if you go through college and you love your major as I did in my minor, but I knew that wasn't my career choice. There are a lot of really lucky people who know they want to be a doctor or an engineer or a teacher or a painter, right? And they know that immediately. I think that's fantastic. I was always, honestly, a little jealous of that because you just see these people who are born to do these things, right? It's fabulous. I wasn't like that.I was building skills, I guess.
LJR: Yeah. So what was the first set of opportunities you saw after graduation?
RB: I think the first, the first thing out of college was how to fellowship to work on Capitol Hill. And I was interested in government in the sense that I remember. I mean, obviously being in New Hampshire, right? Those primaries are incredibly important. I want to say I volunteered for like Bill Clinton's. Like hold some signs, right? I'll find some point place or something. And then of course, as I'm sure you remember, we would get a lot of candidates come through lectures and things like that. And I was always interested in that. I think it's because politics is like he'd had the public discourse, right? I mean, everyone to me has a responsibility, right? To be involved in that and vote. But also I was just interested in the institutions and how they worked now. I see that, right? There was sort of like the initial interest when I was younger. But then when I got the fellowship and worked on the Hill, I didn't know what that meant. Practically. I didn't know, kind of what the daily life of, I was essentially like a paid intern to be fair. I was 22, right? I wasn't like writing laws, to be very clear. I was like making sure my member had her bagel and a diet Coke and that kind of thing. And then luckily I did end up working with both the chief of staff and an LD (legislative director) at the time in that office that I worked for who were kind enough to take an interest in me and what the kind of issues that I was interested in and gave me a little more work and it kind of grew from there. And then. I ended up, as I said, I'm from Mississippi originally ended up meeting some folks who worked for Senator for Mississippi at an event that my dad actually had a connection to him. He was like, Hey, you should go to this lunch. I can't travel for it; you should go. Like, it'll just be a fun experience to meet some other people. Cause part of the great thing about the Hill is a lot of people are really young when they start off. Right. It's a, it's a young person's game, right? And then there's whore a lot of people from all over the country into that's really fun. So I went and met a lot of folks from the Senate office. They had an opening like a month later called me and said, Hey, you want to interview for those? And I was like, yeah, absolutely. Let's do it. Cause my fellowship was going to end. I had to be perfectly Frank when he wasn't sure if I was going to stay or not. I was trying to Charmin. I had some friends, you know, like a lot of us remember in New York, right? Like maybe I do that and yet get California. And a lot of relatives in Southern California. I was really trying to figure it out and got this opportunity spent about 15 years in the Senate personnel office. And then on a committee doing work for the appropes (appropriation) committee, which basically funds all the, all the agencies in the federal government. So ended up with an expertise in budgeting, which if you namely, the in high school is homeless various, like I just didn't, I never really took them out. I was always interested in, in literature, right? And sort of government that never really invented thing, but that's, that's my expertise now, which makes me laugh.
LJR: But as his expertise in budgeting really about the math, or is it about negotiations around the math?
RB: Great question. It's both. I would say it's probably 60, 40 negotiations, right? But you have to have some aptitude. I mean, I, I certainly, and no math major. You would never confuse me for a math major, but you have to develop some expertise and comfort with numbers because you are, you're making policy decisions, right? Based on where you want to put your money. I mean, that's, that's sort of the, the long and short of it, but I, you kinda hit on what I really liked about that job though, which was it's the negotiation part it's sitting down across, you know, with one person on your side—I was working in the Senate side at the time, my Senate counterpart with our house counterparts on the other side of the table and sort of talking through issues and figuring out where our members were and where our bodies were on particular issues and working through them. And so it's a lot of about listening to people, understanding what's important, knowing what's important on your side, and certainly had to come to an agreement and it was it involved a lot of late nights. A lot of dinners from vending machines.
LJR: That's so funny. I was about to say, it sounds like those late night conversations about, you know, do we go to Collis or do we go to Full Fare, you know, [RB: yeah, yeah, yeah.] So many years on the hill. And where did that route take you? Because as you said, it's a young person's game, not to say we're not still young. We are, but opportunities do come. And so what, what was your your path out of there.
RB: So I got to a point where in the, I was on the committee, right. Sort of managing budget. And it was getting to the point where that process is getting really bogged down. So I had sort of felt like I was running my head into a brick wall, which is not that fun,
LJR: Well we were shutting down the government, right?
RB: Exactly. Yeah. And that's just, that's no fun. And so there a couple of different paths that, that I've seen, I had seen at the time, like colleagues of mine take. You can certainly spend a career there. So I could have looked at other committee opportunities, which I will say I enjoy working in a personal office because it connected me to Mississippi, but also a committee is probably where my heart really lies. Like if I ever were to go back, that's what I would do is you have opportunity to dig into an issue, you know, specifically. So I could have done that. If you choose to lobby, you can go sort of corporate route. You can go firm. You can obviously go non-profit, right? There are opportunities. Third party groups, right? There are opportunities in town. I mean, DC, like everybody lovingly refers to it as a, you know, a government town and I think that's right. Although we have, I believe ,really grown and diversified. But at its heart, it's a government town. So there are other options as well. For me, I ended up going to work corporate government relations in the transportation space because my sort of expertise on appropriations was in environmental issues, which obviously is a correlation with transportation. That was great. It really taught me, which I didn't know until I did it, which is also a great lesson right for life and what you're choosing to do…that you're probably going to focus on four or five specific issues when you're in-house like that for a particular company. And if, if you don't wake up every day motivated by those five issues, it can start to get sort of monotonous. And I didn't, I just didn't know that before. I really liked again—back to sort of how important relationships are—I built some really, really good relationships, both within my office and the people I ended up working with. Cause I ended up sorta lobbying, so to speak a different group of staffers that I had worked with. And so it sort of opened up. I know there were sort of issue expertise that I just really hadn't crossed over into my previous job and so that was awesome. I mean, still I see those folks a lot now, and it's, it's really great for me. I wouldn't have met them otherwise. But I realized I spent about four and a half years there and I realized I was coming up against like, I could sort of wake up in the middle of the night, if you called me at 2:00 AM and be like, what are the five most important issues that the company I worked for and I can name them for you. And I sort of started to think, I felt like I had on like a jacket that was a little too tight. Like I needed to grow again and experience something. And that's also a good lesson because I was in my early forties, I guess, early forties. And it's great to know there's, there's more to learn, right? There's another experience out there. I think we can get an, I think I was guilty of that cause I spent about 15 years on the Hill. You can kind of get tunnel vision, right? You don’t think about what else is out there for you? What other experiences there are still left to discover, right? And so now that firm, I've been here for almost five years, and obviously there are always pluses and minuses at a firm,.I'm working on a number of different issues, right? And so I kind of view it as a little bit of a ping pong ball. Like I can, you know, I can be working on a tax issue in the morning and then move to an education issue in the afternoon, but that's kept me really sharp. I like that aspect of it in terms of it—and again, sort of the lobbying part of it, the advocating with folks on the Hill or in agencies or with third party groups that is always the same. It's just, you know, what side of the table are you on, rght? Are you working for a specific line? And if you're in-house, right, that's what we're living, but I've enjoyed the firm part of it because I can learn new things, which is important. And dig into issues that I just never would have imagined that would interest me. Honestly, I never worked tax issues on the Hill but I've really enjoyed my exposure to those. I have a number of clients that care about education, which has been sort of a throughline for me, which I'm really happy that I worked on that obviously mattered in college, right? I love that. And then ended up working education issues and my first job on the side of that. So I sort of, I love keeping sort of contact with those issues. They're meaningful for me, but it's also fun to try new things, right? And then that again leads me to new groups of people on the Hill as well.
LJR: So talking about that, kind of breaking out of that tunnel vision on the Hill and your career, to try new things…I get the sense that many Washingtonians are like tunnel vision in work is life. And how have you been able to kind of break that tunnel vision of you know, at work all the time, a hundred percent?
RB: That's something that people struggle with. Yes. I sort of realized kind of halfway through my time on the Hill, like the, I don't think this is an unusual or unique to politics, but people generally, when they introduce themselves, like at an event on the Hill, they lead with, I work for Senator so and so, or Congressman so and so, Congresswoman so and…right? Like that is important to people and it is important. I mean, it tells you immediately where somebody might be from. There's a natural sort of rivalry between Senate and House. Right. Like whatever Senate versus that's just how it is
LJR: …ideologies…
RB: Yeah, Ideo…Oh God, we won't even touch that. But yes, definitely. Right. So there's a lot of that. And I just realized pretty early on that's like, that’s…my job is important. It's important to me to bring value, right? To the teammates internally and externally for whoever I'm working for. However, I don't think of myself first as lobbyist. Like, that's not like I would imagine most of the people who know me well, that's probably farther down on the list, right? I mean, I think Mets fan is probably up there. Southerner. Music fan, right? Like right. Red wine drinker. Right. There's a lot of other things that I think would come first. And so to your point, yes, This is a town that everybody is very focused on the job, their career, what's next, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's great. But I think I have survived this long, frankly, and I’m still happy doing what I'm doing because I have other interests and I built friendships here. Like after I talk to you I’m meeting two friends for happy hour that I've had for 15 plus years. Right. I met them on the Hill. We all work in government, but we, I guarantee that's not what we're talking about, right? Talking about basketball, talking about whatever we’re drinking. Talking about what’s going on this weekend, right? Just sort of normal. Normal conversation.
LJR: Yeah. That's just so stark though on the Hill. I mean, I think you're right in many trades, in many fields, people kind of lead with, I work at, I work, you know, in…but when you have to define your work by, I work for this other person and the person’s identity kind of subsumes your own identity, that's really interesting. And I think it's good for you to have acknowledged that early on. Like I'm not that person. You may glean a lot from knowing that person and you think you know who I am, but they're not a Mets fan. They drink white wine like that…I'm different. Right? I'm me. I wish we got into that more and put that on our name badges rather than kind of all these institutional things or other people's.
RB: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And you're right. It is it's particular with politics in that way. Cause I think there are a lot of people that they either envisioned a political career for themselves. Right. In which case, I mean, this is what you're living for and there that's great. I mean, I want good, decent, talented, smart people in politics cause otherwise, right, what are we doing? And I want good at talented, decent, smart people to work on the Hill, cause those good decent members need support. Right? I mean, I'm honestly thrilled that young people still want to come here and work, considering sort of the tenor of politics right now. I'm really happy that that continues to happen and it does, and I get to see it. It's great. But yeah, there's a part of it. I hope people also understand: You’re important, too, right? Your…sort of your development, your interest outside of what you're doing with during the day. And I think it's also a product of now like political news is 24/7. And so it's hard to get away, I think for people. But for me, it was important to realize that early on and to be comfortable with it and to be, well, I guess and just sort of find a group of people who share that. I think my really great friends that I think of here in DC, who work in politics—of course I have friends who've don’t—they're the ones who do, we’re varying degrees, right, on this scale. But we’re all, generally speaking, kind of the same mindset in that there's—just in order to make this work for yourself and to be successful, but to also be happy, there have to be other outlets.
LJR: Yeah, for sure. So Rebecca thinking back to 20-something fresh out of college, taking on a…who knows what this internship or this fellowship is going to feel like, what would that Rebecca say if you told her where you are and what life has looked like over the past 25 years?
RB: I think she'd be surprised that I made my life here. I liked DC a lot. It has like kind of a Southern undertone for me, which made me feel comfortable sort of immediately. I don't know if it's the way the neighborhoods are built or you know the limits we have on building size, right. It's not New York. Right. But in New York, New York, and I love New York, I don't get me wrong, but it can feel overwhelming. I, and for me, I don't know if it's like DC felt approachable to me as a young person, because again, a small town and then Dartmouth of course is like, obviously beautiful, but also manageable, right? Like it's a manageable size. So I love DC but I was open to the possibility of sort of anything at that point.
I couldn't have put a name on it. So I think 22 year old Rebecca would have been surprised that this is the career that I've chosen and that I’m here.
LJR: Well, it seems to have worked this long. So who knows what will happen in the next chapter? And you say you're open to things and I definitely feel it. So who knows, but we wish you well, wherever that road takes you, and thank you so much for sharing this story.
LJR: No, I'm happy to do it. Thanks again. I'm really glad you're doing this series by the way. I've enjoyed it. I've enjoyed listening to our classmates quite a bit.
LJR: That was Rebecca Benn, who is a Mets fan, red wine drinker, music lover and ready accomplice for a winning happy hour or brunch in DC. She’s also a partner at bipartisan lobbying firm Ballard Partners where she continues to advise both government and corporate decision makers on a wide range of policy issues. We try to present a wide range of stories on Roads Taken, with nearly a hundred guests featured. If you know of someone with a story to share, fill out the Contact Us form at RoadsTakenShow.com, and then--since we hope you're already subscribed and get an episode delivered to you each week--listen out to see if they become a guest with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley on another Roads Taken.