Survey: Pamela Day

Pamela Day

Position: Chief of staff, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska)

Age: 33

Hometown: Middletown, N.Y.

Marital status/children: Single; no kids

Last job: Deputy chief of staff/legislative director for Rep. Young

First job: Staff assistant for then-Rep. Ben Gilman (R-N.Y.)

Most unusual job: “I worked at a county fair and local stock car races. You meet all kinds of people doing that.”

Most embarrassing moment: “I slipped and fell during a live, televised performance with a high school dance choir.”

Number of cups of coffee you drink per day: Usually none

Religion: “I was raised Roman Catholic.”

Favorite political TV show or movie: “ ‘The West Wing,’ hands down.”

Most inspirational figure: “My parents.”

Dream job (not including present one): Broadway performer

College: Catholic University of America

Passion outside work: The New York Yankees

Claim to fame: “I’ve been told I make great meatballs and sauce.”

As a Catholic University student, Pamela Day had planned on becoming an accountant. But the upstate Netw York native landed a Capitol Hill internship that would change all that.

While still in school, Day began to work for then-Rep. Ben Gilman (R-N.Y.), her hometown congressman.

“It was a great fit,” she says. “He was one of those guys you just loved to work for. He was kind of like my grandfather [or] Mr. Rogers.”

As for her abandonment of accounting for the political world, Day calls it “a complete fluke.”

“I thought I’d be a [certified public accountant], working on taxes,” she says. “And I kind of took a different path. It kind of snuck up on me.”

Day now leads Rep. Don Young’s (R-Alaska) office as his new chief of staff and plans to help her boss on a very energy-focused agenda.

“This office, it’s all about energy,” she says, “because without it, we can’t do much else.

“We have such a need for petroleum-based and carbon-based energy that, for us, that’s a really big thing,” she says. “It means jobs for Alaska.

Day comes from a family of teachers and says education policy is also high on her boss’s list of priorities.

She says she and Young are looking to make changes to the federal No Child Left Behind education law that are “good for Alaskans and also for the country.”