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During my internship with CDD Ghana (the Centre) I supported a myriad of different projects and worked with various teams to create presentations, write draft memoranda, and create reports. Through these experiences, I learned so much, along two key axes.

First, I gained a far more comprehensive and detailed knowledge about Ghanaian politics, economics, and society. Further, I applied and tested what I have learned in my courses – theories, background knowledge, and expectations– to real outcomes and current plans for reform and/ or development, validating my past work and furthering my own understanding of Ghana in particular, West Africa writ large, and, to a degree, countries or societies that I’m yet unfamiliar with. The best example of this came in my fourth week, when I began to research and write three draft memoranda on Ghanaian social protection, housing, and transport. As I evaluated regional-level access, function, and impacts, I quickly learned to navigate a myriad of government, non-profit, and private sources. Then, I evaluated the often incomplete data at my disposal to make conclusions and draft policy recommendations, all very quickly. The time -sensitivity of my work both further developed and proved my ability, honed on the job, to research both quickly and deeply, then effectively translate my research into simple, communicable ideas. This part of my experience with the Centre will help me not only in my coming studies, but in my professional career and beyond, as we always need the ability to find the relevant facts, understand them, and then apply them to our tasks at hand.

The second, and most important, way in which I grew during my time with the Centre was building my flexibility, tenacity, and adaptability. Working on a diverse set of projects, with people I never met face-to-face, and in a different time zone, I had to work hard to have a measurable impact. On my first project, connected with the Centre’s annual Democracy Capture Index, I struggled with the time difference, as for example, questions I sent Monday morning (afternoon in Accra) were not responded to until early Tuesday morning, meaning I had to regularly backtrack on work. However, from this experience I further adjusted my personal schedule, rising to my responsibilities and thereby bettering my communication, lowering my stress, and improving the quality of my work. This reinforced to me the importance of personal flexibility and direct communication when tackling important projects, and temporarily adapting my schedule to support others so I could fulfill my responsibilities. My first test of resilience during my time with the Centre helped me to easily recognize when the situations that followed required my near-complete flexibility and clear communication, so I was able to better adjust and more easily complete my following projects.

Another significant way I developed my resilience during my internship was by supporting different teams with contrasting needs. On the Ghana Elections Petitions project, I worked with a new team who I had limited contact with, due to their other overlapping commitments. Therefore, I learned to more thoroughly answer my own questions, so I could maximize the impact of my work and still effectively contribute to the project. However, when I did come up against questions I couldn’t figure out, and my co-workers had not yet responded to me, I learned to persevere and find alternate avenues of work –meaning different connected topics. When work on this project slowed, I reached out to our Internship Coordinator to find additional projects, so I could maximize my time with the Centre and continue to have an impact while I navigated and supported others’ work on the Elections Petitions projects. This led me to work with an entirely separate team on the Ghana Cities Monitor project, and while I summarized the report, analyzed it, and created a Frequently Asked Questions section, work picked up again on the Elections Petitions project. As I finished work on both projects, I came to the end of my time with the Centre.

In reflecting on this back half of my internship, I applied the ‘technical’ skills –my analytical and communication capacities– which I built in school, in my past work, and at the beginning of the summer, but I developed and reinforced my far more important, universally relevant, ‘life’ skills of resilience and persistence. In tandem with the ‘technical’ skills I developed at the Centre these ‘life’ skills will enable me to take on far greater challenges in my academic, personal, and professional life. Further, my time with the Centre showed me how to apply what I’ve learned studying Political Science and Economics, reinforcing my passion for these two subjects and, possibly, opening up more avenues for research or work after graduation.