The Final Weeks
My time at Winrock sadly came to an end this past week. And while I know that I will miss working on the many projects that I had the chance to be a part of, I also know that I gained new insights and invaluable skills that will be a huge benefit to me throughout my career.
In my final two weeks at Winrock I had to work with my fellow intern as well as our boss to research, prepare, and deliver a presentation on our new project (as with my last post, I am unfortunately still unable to provide specifics on the nature of this project). This presentation felt like a worthy culmination of everything that I have worked on over the past two and a half months.
The presentation, which was only supposed to be around 15 minutes long, clocked in at well over 30 minutes. We clearly had a lot to discuss! The purpose of the presentation was to convince some of the Winrock higher ups to continue on with our project and we were successful on that front! The project will move forward and eventually be fully implemented. It's an amazing feeling knowing that my work this summer has led to the early stages of a multimillion-dollar project that, if everything goes as planned, will better the lives of thousands of people!
In addition to this presentation, I also spent the last two weeks writing up the fifth and final annual report for the Cambodia Counter Trafficking in Person (CTIP) program. This involved looking through the data from the quarterly reports for this year and synthesizing them into one succinct narrative.
For as successful as the CTIP program has been over the past five years, there is no denying that the progress in year five has been less than ideal due to the Pandemic. Many of our partners in the private sector have had to completely shut down their hiring processes. Unfortunately, this means that we were not as successful in helping potential trafficking victims find sources of sustainable income. Which of course means that they are now more vulnerable to trafficking than they were before the Pandemic.
I have thoroughly enjoyed my internship at Winrock. I realize that my experience would have been completely different in a COVID-19 free world, but this experience has given me the chance to work behind the scenes and learn how a prominent NGO operates. Coming into the summer I had never really considered working for an NGO after law school. Nor had I ever considered working to prevent human trafficking. But now, after everything I have seen, experienced, and learned this summer, I honestly feel as if working for Winrock or a similar NGO combating human trafficking is a very possible career choice for me. One way or another, I know that I will always value this internship and I would highly recommend it to any other law student.