I just completed the third week of my internship and it’s safe to say I’ve made myself right at home in D.C. My work and home environments are both meeting my expectations for new challenges and adventures, to say the least. I’m living in a George Washington University dorm just a block away from buildings like the IMF and World Bank and as I mentioned in my last post, a mere 7 minute jog from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It’s not hard to get up out of bed and catch the metro when you feel so close and connected to the institutions you’ve only been able to read about and discuss in a classroom.
Additionally, the projects my team was assigned have finally been laid out and I’m pleasantly surprised by the work ahead of us. As an intern for a White House initiative focused on increasing educational opportunities for indigenous students, our focus lies in protecting these native students’ civil rights. Created by previous policy assistants, we were handed down a massive database in which civil rights concerns have been documented. It is our task to update, revise, and most-likely redesign the database which requires a fundamental understanding of the programming they used, statistical research, and of course, data input. While the last task can definitely be draining, I would argue there is potential for it to be exciting for our project because we get to geocode. Our initiative hopes to one day publish the data we’ve collected through a visual representation on several maps of the United States. This requires geocoding which will definitely present a new, possibly challenging, terrain for me. My executive supervisor has put me in charge of this project and while that poses some pressure, I’m excited to step beyond my comfort zone and develop new skills along the way.
In addition to this, I’m working on a project that is going to highlight a misinterpretation of census data collected from the Common Core. I was unaware that while identifying with specific ethnicities and races on a test form, if a student who identified as an American Indian marked it as so, but also marked that they associated with a Hispanic ethnicity, they were automatically discounted as American Indian students. One could only imagine that there would be a significantly lower American Indian student population recorded than in reality, actually exists. This statistic could become important for schools applying for grants specifically aiming to serve as resources for indigenous students. Thus the aim of our project is to present that gap between the recorded indigenous student population and theactual indigenous population. I am also the lead intern on this project as well.
All in all, I am feeling surprisingly productive and useful at my internship. I was pretty fearful that I would fall into the stereotypical role of a government intern, that being useless. Thus far I have felt very purposeful and I’m finding the work actually engaging. My supervisors are really charismatic hard workers and they’re very fun to be around. We’ve also been added to an intern email group in which we get invited to lunches with employees from other departments and “field trips” to places like the Supreme Court and (hopefully) the White House.
So essentially, work is great, the city is great, my D.C. friends are great, and I am great. I’m done with week 3 and still doing great!
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