Technically this was supposed to be our last week to do research...well, that didn't happen. Monday I spent basically the entire day gathering information--about the opium trade in Afghanistan and its place among world production of poppy, about military capabilities, and about everything ISAF. Before this internship I never thought I would know so much about the international opium trade, or hectares of opium produced in Afghanistan (I didn't even know what a hectare was!) or the number of ASW helicopters each country in NATO has. My job was to find out these things-- without the book of the Military Balance I would never have been able to get most of this work done...and, boy, when I had gotten most of this information by 5 pm Monday, I was very proud of myself! But the work wasn't done yet...
Unfortunatly, I was informed when I came in on Thursday morning that part of our expert advisory team did not like the direction we were headed in for the initial assessment. This was most definitely not what I wanted to hear. While my boss tried to calm down and get everything reorganized, I headed on to DonorPerfect and manage to remember everything I was taught about it over a month earlier. I put all of our contacts from the project into the database--names, addresses, phone numbers, e-mails and all! it was probably some of the most tedious work I have ever done--but I did get it done and that was the end of it! Yay! The rest of the day was filled with finding quotes from high levels officials abroad about the threat to NATO should we fail in Afghanistan, the threat to Europe, and countries individual capabilites. This was also pretty tedious, however I did learn a lot about Defense Ministers, Parlimentarians, and Generals from all over Europe!
I also found out this week that we have our first official Leadership Committee Meeting on November 16th! I'm very excited that I will get to be there and meet all the important people on our Leadership Committee! It will definitely be a highlight to this internship!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment