12 Days Left: Final Deadlines
Work Update:
Everything came together perfectly this week at work. I finished drafting the Country Note on Ghana and was able to send it to the rest of the team. The actual writing process was fairly streamlined because I already had a large percentage of the sources I needed, and I was able to follow examples from Country Notes written earlier by other members of the research team. I think the output is a good narrative representation of the dataset I have been crafting, and I look forward to getting comments from the rest of the research team so that I can finish up the edits entirely before the conclusion of the internship.
Other than working on the Country Note, I spent this week editing the dataset based on feedback and ensuring the dataset is formatted properly for future use. I also managed find a solution to an issue a few other researchers were running into on a different project. They had a scanned pdf that was in French, and the text was not able to be searched or copied; this meant that unless they could find someone who read French to translate the document, they had to physically type paragraphs into Google Translate. After hearing the dilemma, I remembered using a software to convert scanned pdfs into word documents using Optical Character Recognition. I did a quick test to ensure it still worked, and then converted the pdf into a Word document. I then used the translate feature in Microsoft Word to translate the entire document rather than Google Translate because there is no word count maximum in Microsoft Word. I sent what I had come up with to one of the team members working on the project. It ended up saving a lot of time and my boss is having me write up the process for them to be able to replicate in the future.
Adventures in Cape Town:
As for adventures this week, my boss offered to take me on a hike and I readily accepted! He ended up taking me to Silvermine, part of Table Mountain National Park. My boss is an avid trail runner, and it was clear from the moment he stepped out of the car in jeans with no water bottle that he could hike circles around me. I love to hike in the States and felt like I was in good shape, but as soon as we started working up toward higher elevations I began to struggle. We made it three-fourths of the way to the top when we decided to take an alternate route. It was embarrassing to have to admit defeat while my boss was not sweating or breathing hard, but he was gracious and suggested my recent illness likely played a factor in my trouble breathing. The rest of the hike was also gorgeous, and I enjoyed listening to my boss’ trail running stories as we descended. After the hike, I got to meet one of his kids and they took me to one of their favorite spots in their neighborhood. It was great time overall and I’m looking forward to reaching the summit on our next hike!