Brandon Sanchez : Office of the Mayor, San Jose
I walk into the office on the seventeenth floor, and resting on top of a cubicle is a gargantuan plastic shark wearing a sombrero.
“Does this embody the spirit of the office?” I jokingly ask one of my supervisors. As I’ve come to realize in the past few weeks, this is exactly the case—the Legislative Policy team in the Office of the Mayor of San Jose is lively, plucky, and determined. Everyone is utterly devoted to their respective policy areas, and I have a lot to learn. How does one advocate for policy change? What do all the reports, analyses, and syntheses add up to? The atmosphere is fast-paced and exciting, and I couldn’t wait to dive into the deep end.
Before I could get to any of that, I was tasked with completing a “new guy” kind of job: writing commendations. A supervisor told me that drafting commendations (a.k.a. the “new guy job”) was the first thing he did, too, so this felt like an initiation of sorts. A commendation in this context is essentially a document that recognizes and explicates how a citizen of San Jose and Silicon Valley has contributed to the public good. In between writing commendations, I was sealing envelopes addressed to such bigwigs as Elon Musk and Larry Page.
But where were the real meat and potatoes? When would I sink my teeth into substantive, “big picture” work? The time finally came for me to focus intently on crime. Arrests are down in San Jose, and recent initiatives to keep at-risk youth in school and out of the penal system have been wildly successful. I’m beginning to apply tenets of behavioral science to San Jose’s unique sociocultural context, and it has resulted in a great flow of knowledge. In these first few weeks, I’ve learned more about how some of Santa Clara’s fundamental principles (social justice, education of the whole person) are developing in my life. I can’t wait to start my crime analysis project in earnest. There’s far more to come…stay tuned.