Last Day and Some things to leave you with...

Monday was my last day at the think-tank I have come to know and love these past three months. Even though I was only there 2 days a week, I really felt like I learned so much from everyone there and have grown in a professional way.

My last day was somewhat of a conglomeration of what I have been doing all semester. For the first few hours of the day I attempted to transcript the meeting that we held on the 16th and that was a lot harder than I thought it would be. I ended up devising a strategy to make the listening and writing more efficient, having them both take up halves of the screen. This made it a lot easier to go between the two screens and listen and write. Even though I worked on the transcription for several hours, I only managed to get about 20 minutes of the recording into a transcript. The rest of the day I did some last minute organization of all the files that were on my computer so that they could be accessed after I left. I also did some research and I was the last person to review the draft version of the assessment before it went out to more people. It needed to go out before Obama's speech on Tuesday. Luckily we got it in to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton's office before the end of the day! I also found out that my name would be mentioned at the end of the assessment! Yay! I can't wait to see the final version of Remobilizing NATO in Afghanistan: Ensuring the Alliance's Future! To know that I was a part in creating it makes me very excited!

This internship made me realize quite a few things and I believe that it was one of the best choices of my college education. Working in a professional atmosphere taught me in in's and out's of working at a real job and what my life might be like after college. This internship was not what I expected, it was much more and I can't believe that I got to do so much as only a sophomore! To be involved is such huge political movements such as this makes me proud and excited to see what might come of my labor. This practical experience in the job force was extremely important to my future career and now I know what my career path might be after school. It has helped me figure out things that I don't want to do and things that I do want to do. It also greatly increased my understanding of NATO, the war in Afghanistan, international politics, international relations and the role of think-tanks all over the world. This internship has taught me much more than any class has and I know that everything I learned there will be extremely useful in the future. I am so grateful to have had this experience and look forward to doing one again.