I am few weeks into the internship now and have been thoroughly enjoying DC. Every weekend, I venture out to a new museum or neighborhood. The Georgetown area has been my absolute favorite so far. The public transportation system is a huge improvement from Boston, and I look forward to my bus ride to work every morning past the beautiful buildings of Embassy Roy and DuPont Circle.
I am neck deep into the gender project, which has been testing my API 202 and API 203 skills to the fullest! I couldn’t be more grateful to the incredible curriculum and teaching team at HKS for equipping me with the advanced statistical skills needed for this work. Yet, I am having to go beyond and teach myself new analyses and skills that I am less experienced in. The process of figuring things out by myself is daunting and gratifying at the same time.
I’m also having fun brushing up my STATA skills after several months of using mainly R at HKS. I really wish HKS gave us free access to STATA – it would have made our lives so much easier!
In addition to exercising my quantitative skills, I find myself relying on my policy memo writing skills surprisingly often. While going through the memo drill during PDD in the Fall, little did I think that I would have to use those skills so actively. For example, I am conscious of how I frame certain statistical concepts or figures keeping in mind non-technical audiences. This internship is helping me see how strong communication is as key to any kind of analysis as the core research skills.
In fact, even the design and overall presentation of a report or memo can have such an impact on how people engage with the material. For example, the policy memos produced by eMBeD use beautiful graphics and layouts that make a difference to how I engage with and process the material. I wonder if there are any studies on the impact of design on the messaging effectiveness of policy documents…that would be interesting to test!
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