If you notice a striking young woman with stick-straight brown hair and distinctive dark eyes touring the corridors of the Capitol, there’s a chance she could be Coty Wamp, the 19-year-old daughter of Rep. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.).

This summer Coty is an intern in the office of Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.). Wanting to be a Capitol Hill intern since she was 4 years old, she first became acquainted with the senator last summer. Ensign is among several lawmakers who live with her father in a house on C Street.

So by evening, when she’s spending time with her father after work, it’s quite normal for Coty to address Ensign as “John.” By day, however, it’s strictly “Senator.”

Coty understands the power that comes with elected office in only the way that a daughter of a member can.

“A lot of interns think senators are God,” she says. “They are normal people. They go home, take their shoes off and turn on ESPN.”

Being the daughter of a congressman puts her in the admittedly precarious position of having others second-guess her ability to land a competitive Senate summer internship without her father’s influences.

Coty concedes as much, but not entirely.

“In most cases in this city you need connections,” she says. “It would have been hard to intern for Ensign had my dad not been his roommate.”

But she mentions that her GPA is a 3.6 and adds, “I’m confident regardless of my dad that I’d be up here interning this summer even if my dad was a garbage man in Chattanooga.”

By far Coty’s favorite intern duty is giving Capitol tours. With a thick Tennessee twang laced with “y’alls,” she occasionally encounters raised eyebrows from Nevada constituents unfamiliar with her accent.

They are in good hands, though; she has watched her father, famous for the exquisite detail of his Capitol tours, give 50 of them. Though Rep. Wamp, proud and protective, has asked to accompany his daughter on her tours, so far she has refused.

“That would be intimidating,” she says.

Coty soon begins her sophomore at the University of Tennessee, where she studies political science. But she won’t rule out running for office or becoming a lobbyist someday.

The question she receives most often is: “What’s it like being the daughter of a member of Congress?” To which she counters, “What is not like?”

She was just 6 years old when her father came to Congress, and marched around her father’s Washington office with authority.

”I would fire people,” she says. “I would say, ‘You’re fired, you’re fired.’ ”

These days Coty presents a much more affable front to staff and fellow interns. Though she greets another of her father’s roommates, Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), by first name on a recent afternoon in the Capitol — “Hey Bart! How are you?” — she tries to be like any intern and waits as long as possible before revealing to them that her father works on the other side of the Capitol.

“Sometimes I’d rather keep it under wraps,” she said.