Week 8: Budgets & Contracts
I officially have two weeks left at NCSC! I cannot believe how fast time has gone this summer. While I am excited to visit some family when this internship ends, I will be extremely sad to say goodbye to the wonderful people I have met this summer and have had the opportunity to work with each day. This week, I continued to work on the technical proposal for the Malaysia project. On Tuesday, I had to work remotely while fighting a fever. Unfortunately, I missed the Pakistan Supreme Court visiting for a presentation on judicial research centers. I mentioned previously in one of my other blog posts that I did research on the judicial research centers in South Africa and Peru. The presentation NCSC gave to the visiting judges was the research the other interns and I compiled and put into a PowerPoint. I was disappointed I missed the chance to see the presentation after being able to contribute to the research, but I heard it went great.
The rest of the week, I focused on drafting the budget narrative for the Malaysia project and revising the software services agreement another intern and I have been working on since the first week. Having the opportunity to also work with the budgets on a project has been a very interesting experience because it gives a better idea of how difficult it is to get the funding for these projects. There are a lot of goals and objectives to accomplish with these projects, but sometimes, the money is not always there. I spent a lot of time with Tim revising the budgets and trying to make everything fit within the maximum amount of funding we will receive. One challenging aspect has been deciding whether to make the project last for 18 or 24 months. Originally, the proposal set the timing at 24 months. But after examining the timeline of the three phases of the project, it seems more financially feasible to do it in 18 months. Overall, I have enjoyed getting to work on the different sides of the project, from analyzing the Notice of Funding Request, drafting the technical proposal, and reworking the budget. I may not work with budgets a lot depending on which direction my career goes, but having the experience to work on program management at multiple levels has not only provided me with a clear idea on how projects initiate at NCSC, but has also provided me with better time management, organizational, and analytical skills.
One of my favorite assignments this summer has been working on the software services agreement. I received this assignment my first week, and I thought we had wrapped everything up about two weeks ago. I met with Tim this week to go over it more in detail, and we ended up having a lot more revisions to the contract. Our goal is to create a standard model for software service agreements. Originally, I compared two different software service agreements to create the model subcontract. However, at the meeting this week, Tim wanted us to base the model subcontract on a new commercial goods and services agreement. Using this as another example for creating model provisions helped us restructure the contract to make it clear and concise and easy to read. We also discussed putting an NDA into the contract, so I had the opportunity to see various confidentiality agreements as examples. There is still a lot of work to do on this assignment now, but I am excited to get started. Having these intellectually stimulating conversations with Tim and the other interns has been a great experience. I've not only learned a lot about the contracting work NCSC does, but I have also come to actually enjoy working on contracts. (If you had asked me how I felt about contracts after taking it in the spring, I would have had a different reaction)
Well, that is all I have for this week's blog! Next week, we have a judge from Ethiopia visiting the office, and we have several incoming assignments, so stay tuned!