Colts offensive tackle Jalen Travis reflects on his time as a Senate intern

Justin Papp, CQ-Roll Call on May 27, 2025

Published in Football

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Interning in the Senate is not very much like playing professional football, but Jalen Travis has found some overlap.

“Grinders win. That’s something I learned on the field first and something that was reinforced during my time on the Hill,” Travis said recently, looking back on his brief stint at the Capitol. He was there only 10 weeks, but he settled into a routine.

Every morning was about football. While most of Washington slept, he’d wake up before dawn and either take a bus from his downtown apartment to the YMCA off 14th Street Northwest, or he’d get in a workout at nearby Gonzaga College High School. By 7 a.m. he was shifting into intern mode, heading to the Hill to work for Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.

“I knew that August wasn’t coming any slower and I had to be ready for fall camp. I was willing to do whatever it took so I could have the best of both worlds,” Travis said.

Now that work ethic, paired with “God-given” ability and a nearly 6-foot-8-inch, 340-pound frame, has landed him a spot in the NFL. After his college years at Princeton and then Iowa State University, the offensive tackle was selected by the Indianapolis Colts last month in the fourth round of the draft.

“Everybody gets the same 24 hours, and those who are willing to put in the work typically find the most success,” he said.

Part of his job as an intern three summers ago was greeting guests and shepherding them to Klobuchar’s office. “Even the guests were like, ‘You are abnormally large for an intern,’ ” Travis said. “I stuck out like a sore thumb. But I worked to embrace it.”

Other athletes would notice him, Travis said. Once in the Senate subway, he ran into Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., a former tight end at Stanford University, who immediately dropped into a three-point stance.

For Travis, who plans to go to law school when his playing days are over, interning was a chance to serve the public and “the privilege of a lifetime,” even if his boss wasn’t a Princeton alum herself. “She’s from that school in New Haven that we don’t like to talk about too much,” Travis said, though he didn’t hold Klobuchar’s Yale pedigree against her. A fellow Minnesotan, he grew up in Minneapolis, where he served as student body co-president of DeLaSalle High School.

He recalls interns in Klobuchar’s office linking up with a cohort who worked for Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., for informal Friday afternoon debates on topics ranging from gun rights to abortion.

“It was an environment where iron sharpens iron. I walked out of that summer feeling more confident, but also more confused in my beliefs as well,” Travis said. “There’s not anywhere on Earth, or at least in this country, where there’s that high of a concentration of people who are interested in the same things you are, but for completely different reasons.”

Asked how that compares to the locker room, Travis said things come up. “You have a group of guys that inevitably won’t agree on a handful of things. But I have to trust them and they have to trust me when it comes to Saturday or Sunday to get the job done,” Travis said. “It’s definitely something I think broader society would benefit from.”