Q&A: David Hervey, Finance policy fellow @ National Journal

Each year, Atlantic Media hires around 40 recent graduates for its fellowship program. Fellows are placed in editorial or business positions across Atlantic Media’s four brands: The Atlantic, National Journal, Government Executive, and Quartz.

Tell us about what you do.

I’m a finance policy fellow at National Journal. A lot of what I do is figuring out what’s going on in finance policy here and making communication materials for advocates and government affairs people so that they can help their organizations understand what’s going on. There’s a lot of data involved, and I do a lot of data visualization because it’s finance and it’s a really numbers heavy area.

What were you working on right before you came up here?

I was putting together this big data set of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, because after the financial crisis they bought a lot of treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities. I haven’t been able to find one good spreadsheet that has all of that, so I’m putting together 12 different data sets that I got from the Fed into one big spreadsheet and making graphs of it.

What’s your favorite thing you’ve worked on since the fellowship started?

I wrote this big thing in R to make maps of where different PACs have donated to which races, so that was a lot of fun and a really good learning experience.

What is something you’ve learned in a non-policy or media related job that’s applicable to what you’re doing now?

In summers in college I worked in a car repair shop. It was always kind of hectic, and I joked that my job was running around from crisis to crisis with a fire extinguisher (sometimes literally.) I think that taught me to not really freak out when stuff happens that I’m not expecting. There were also a lot of deadlines in that, just like there are in this, so that was a good experience too.

What’s your dream job?

I want to be a pro surfer.

Do you surf now?

Well not here, but yeah. I’m from San Diego. My dream job would actually be to move back to San Diego and still do policy.

What led you to the fellowship? Were you always interested in what you’re doing now?

I really wanted to do defense policy. I applied to the fellowship because I worked on my college’s foreign affairs magazine and wrote an angry op-ed in the newspaper, and so I was like okay, maybe that’ll translate into something here. Then I ended up working on this, and it’s been a really great experience to learn a lot about finance policy, both because I double majored with economics and because there’s a lot going on in that policy space right now. It’s been really cool to learn about.

Do you have any advice for people looking for entry level jobs in media or policy?

I feel like my friends from school either know exactly what they want to do for the rest of their lives or they have no idea, and I feel like the people who don’t have any idea what they want to do are kind of uncomfortable about it. But I didn’t know a year ago what I wanted to do with my life, and now I feel like I’m a lot closer — and that was just by going through life and stuff happening. You’re not always going to know where you want to be until you start just going in one direction or another.