Congratulations, Class of 2010! - Columbia College - Columbia ...

columbia college today
Young Lions
in Washington
Several recent alumni are making their presence felt in the Obama administration
B y Ly d i a DePil l i s ’09
For Lukas McGowan ’07, going
to the office every day
means something rather special
— walking through the
doors of the White House.
That’s where he works as a
correspondent for Vice President
Joe Biden, drafting letters on behalf of
his boss to anyone he might need to communicate
with: the Dalai Lama, perhaps, or
the prime minister of Spain.
One day, it was a newly naturalized
Amer ican, whose letter required some serious
contemplation. “I hadn’t given much
thought to what it meant to be an American
citizen,” McGowan says. “It was an
exercise not only in writing, but it also was
a philosophical exercise.”
McGowan had never set his sights on government,
but politics uprooted his life at an
early age. When he was in middle school, during
Bill Clinton’s second term, his father, Gerald
McGowan, was appointed ambassador to
Portugal. So, the seven-child McGowan family
decamped to Lisbon, going from eating
spaghetti most nights in Northern Virginia to
having a staff of eight at a palatial residence in a European capital.
At his international school, McGowan sometimes took heat for
his country. “By being the ambassador’s kid, if America was doing
something, I became the kid who had to stand up for it,” McGowan
remembers of his four years in the Portuguese capital. “At times, I
would have to walk through a group of protesters. They were yelling,
‘Americans are murderers,’ and I would see the guard on the
other side of the gate and he would let me in real quick.”
McGowan, who has a ready smile and easygoing manner,
didn’t consider himself an activist when he got back to the States.
A political science major, he loved the Core Curriculum, played
intramural soccer and immersed himself in the delights of the
city rather than College Democrats meetings. When graduation
rolled around, he signed on with an investment bank in New
York. Politics, however, got in the way again; though McGowan
had been supporting fellow Virginian Mark Warner for President,
things changed when Obama jumped into the race.
“Obama declared, and I knew I had to work for him,” says
McGowan, who had been a fan of the Illinois senator since watching
him deliver the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention
in 2004. That choice landed McGowan in Dallas County, Iowa,
where he was charged with spreading the Obama gospel as one
By now, you’ve probably heard
of the Columbia alumni who hold top spots
in the current administration, including
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. ’73,
’76L; Federal Communications Commission
chairman Julius Genachowski ’85;
and of course President Barack Obama ’83.
But there was a lower-level surge toward
Washington, D.C., as well, a migration of
recent graduates wanting to help implement
the agenda that Obama had laid out
in his campaign and learn how government
works from the inside. In addition to
Josh Lipsky ’08, who works in the White
House visitors office and was the subject
of CCT’s January/February “Alumni
Corner” (www.college.columbia.edu/cct/
jan_feb10), here are three more young
College alumni who are serving on the
front lines in the administration.
of the campaign’s earliest paid staffers. At
that stage, the job meant doing whatever he
could to get attention for Obama, from running
road races to entering eating contests in
his candidate’s name. Wearing a sandwich
board during a parade one day — as far as he
could get from his original investment banking
career plan — McGowan says he thought
to himself, “I just graduated from Columbia.
I didn’t picture myself doing this!”
Obama won Iowa, and the victory made
him a real contender. But that was only the
beginning for McGowan, who in the next
several months sped through California,
Ohio, Wyoming, North Carolina and Puerto
Rico, leaving to help organize the next area as
soon as the last one’s primary was over. For
the general election, he settled into Virginia,
and his work contributed to the first Democratic
presidential win there since 1964.
Soon after Obama’s victory, McGowan
went to Washington, working on the transition
team until he was offered a spot on
the Vice President’s staff. Though the hours
aren’t as crazy as his field organizing days
(he’s usually off in time for dinner), there’s
a different kind of pressure — his boss, after all, is one of the men
running the country. “In the campaign, we understood that losing
wouldn’t be the end of the world,” McGowan explains. “Now
that we’re governing, we don’t have that choice. The stakes are
so much higher now.” And now, McGowan is not only drafting
Biden’s letters but also his speeches: He wrote the first draft of the
Vice President’s remarks on Earth Day and jumped at the chance to
write for an appearance in McGowan’s old turf, Iowa.
On a day-to-day basis, though, there are considerable perks
to McGowan’s job: directing the vice presidential motorcade
through New York City, for example, or playing basketball with
White House staff and elected officials. Sometimes, even senior adviser
David Axelrod stops by to shoot a few hoops. “He’s good!”
McGowan says.
McGowan isn’t sure what his next career move might be — right
now, he says, there’s just too much going on to think about it.
As assistant to the head of the Small Business Administration,
Subash Iyer ’07 is smack in the middle of the
federal government’s attempt to salvage the U.S. economy,
and he got there almost entirely by accident.
At Columbia, Iyer, an economics-political science major, devoted
july/august 2010
24