Politics is almost second nature for Timmy Knudsen. On April 17, inside the Illini Union’s Pine Lounge, he sits in the middle of the room, outwardly calm and relaxed, waiting for the outgoing Illinois Student Senate President Brock Gebhardt to begin Wednesday’s weekly meeting. Tonight, Knudsen will be sworn in as the next vice president-external of the student senate, replacing Jenny Baldwin, junior in LAS, who will soon be the new vice president-internal.

The vice president-external is one of the few positions in ISS that can speak on behalf of the senate as a whole, and one of his goals is to focus on its perception by students. Knudsen, once a political columnist for The Daily Illini, said he has learned a thing or two about how the media works, and wants to use it to improve how students, or constituents as they are sometimes called, perceive the senate.

With his left hand lightly supporting his definitively square jaw, he adjusts his blue and orange tie, smiling in reaction to the bickering, as he calls it at times, of some of the out-going senators behind him. He doesn’t say anything, though.

Knudsen is finishing up his first year of law school at the University. He’s been here for nearly 10 semesters now, and like many of his fellow senators, he said he has been in love with the University even before he enrolled.

As a political science undergraduate, Knudsen became interested in law school after working on multiple campaigns, including that of Alexi Giannoulias, the former Illinois state treasurer. He said he saw the law degree as a powerful instrument for his chosen career path: politics.

And no matter the subject — the sports he played in high school, his sister, his schoolwork, his travel experiences — Knudsen somehow ties it back to politics. But he doesn’t do it in a brash, in-your-face kind of way, and it’s not that he is overly opinionated — it’s more that he exudes the know-how and control of someone who has been there and done that, like many of the politicians and world leaders he admires. All the while, he remains quite humble.

“Whatever he does, he always has this cool balance between humbleness and confidence,” said his older sister, Kristin, who is now an elementary school speech pathologist in Knudsen’s conservative and affluent hometown of Wheaton, Ill.

In Wheaton, his home wasn’t too partisan. He said that while many of the people he had grown up with based their political stances on what their families had taught them, he wanted to go his own way, trying to see every issue from all sides.

“A lot of people like to just adapt to their surroundings, and I don’t like to do that,” the self-proclaimed moderate Democrat said.

Many of Knudsen’s interests lie in foreign policy, but he has chosen not to be too public about them with the other senators, as he doesn’t want those issues to cloud the ones the senate has before it. He credits his two study abroad trips, one to Rome during his undergraduate years and one to the Middle East last summer, as solidifying these interests.

While abroad, Knudsen said he gained an interest in journaling, and he’s kept it up since his return. In his leather Italian messenger bag, he keeps the small blue book with a red ribbon bookmark that his sister gave him after graduation to record his thoughts, when he can. Whenever he needs a pick-me-up, he’ll flip back through his journals.

“When I get stressed out here — because law school has been so different from anything, and it’s just how the movies show it to be — I’ll go back and read my journals, like when I was in Rome and I felt like I had complete freedom and no obligations,” Knudsen said.

To help cut down on some of that stress, he also does yoga regularly and works out every afternoon at the ARC, where he’ll try to do some studying on the machines. Without the constant exercise, he said he can’t sleep well at night.

But with the hectic law school life that Knudsen leads, sometimes he doesn’t sleep at all.

“When I know I am going to pull an all-nighter, I dress up because I never know what I am going to have to do the next day,” he said.

On these occasions, he’ll pull on a good pair of pants, a button-up shirt, a tie and a blazer. One night after Knudsen stayed up working on his appellate brief for his legal writing class, he was invited to lunch with a prominent environmental lawyer. Luckily, he had a blazer — just not the energy.

And when he’s not cramming between meetings and classes (because he says it’s “really scary to get called on in class”) or studying at Caffe Paradiso in Urbana, he said he tries to squeeze in social time. At least once every month or two.

Knudsen keeps up with many of his friends from high school and undergrad. Every now and again, he’ll leave his law school friends at the “grown-up” bars, like those in downtown Champaign, and maybe meet up with his old friends to go to KAM’S, his favorite bar on campus.

“It’s embarrassing, but absolutely,” Knudsen said of the bar, which he said is so traditional, so “U of I.”

Despite the self-deprecating humor and the rare night out, he is focused on what he wants: a public office — perhaps to be a senator one day. But there’s one more immediate goal that he would let sidetrack him, and that would be working on the campaign of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“I mean literally if she runs I will campaign for her,” Knudsen said. “I will leave law school early.” 

But until then, his focus is this campus, working to better his home of the last five years with the senators who share the same passion for this University as he does.

“ISS isn’t just a joke or a place for people to get a title on their resume,” Knudsen said. “There are a lot of good, hard-working kids in there.”

Ryan can be reached at [email protected] and @ryanjweber.