This blog marks my tenth and final week at NCSC. The time has flown by and I am left wondering where it all went. I spent the week putting the finishing touches on several projects. I finally made all of the required changes to NCSC’s subcontract and subagreement, finished a legal memo on the state of asset forfeiture in the United States, completed a technical proposal for the eastern Caribbean regarding sexual assault, and worked with other staff members to modify an existing contract to reflect incoming funds. One of the staff members also gave me the opportunity to attend a training session on proposal writing. This was very interesting and I learned a lot from the process. Mainly I learned all of things that I was doing wrong last summer! It was an interactive experience and involved us working through examples and filing out sample M&E tables and logic models. At the end of the training I felt that I had a much better understanding of the intricacies of proposal writing. I also now have a large stack of papers that include examples and suggestions for any future proposals that I write. With this last activity, however, it was time to leave NCSC for the summer. I packed up all of my materials, turned off my computer one last time and headed home.
My experience at NCSC was a truly rewarding and useful experience. Throughout my ten weeks I was able to work on a diverse set of projects that helped me develop writing, researching, editing, and program development skills. I worked on projects for the Bahamas, Barbados, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Egypt, Kyrgyzstan, Morocco, Peru, the Philippines, Serbia, Tunisia, and Uganda. This internship served as the perfect complement to my internship last summer which focused on project proposals. Project proposals are the beginning of program development and this summer I was able to gain experience in the next step of this process. While I did not know exactly what I was going to work on going into this internship, the end result turned out better than I could have ever expected.
I want to thank all of the wonderful staff at NCSC, Professor Warren, and all of the donors that made my experience possible. My experiences during the last two summers would not have been possible without your help. This opportunity has given me an opportunity to travel, develop new skills, and foster an ever-growing fascination with international rules of law/human rights work. I cannot thank you enough.
