Ola, Giorgi and Emely, who have been working for Kashmir World Foundation (KwF) for seven weeks, share their opinions and experiences as their internships are ending.
According to Emely, this week has been very interesting. “Last Wednesday, we met with our internship supervisor Aliyah to discuss the progress of our work and to set up a plan for the remainder time as interns. Our meeting was good, I personally started to feel like we are going to be done very soon, and that I need to make more progress; however that was not the highlight of my day. At lunchtime, we went for food and we had an interesting conversation about another organization that wants to collaborate with Kashmir World Foundation. I feel very glad that Aliyah values our opinion as interns and that she decided to talk to us about this partnership before making a decision because it shows that she wants to consider other people’s opinions and that she does not rush into making important decisions,” she explains. “From this meeting, I learned that an organization like Kashmir World Foundation needs to consider the benefit for others but not only in money but in ideas and possible expansion. Aliyah explained to us how her meeting with this potential partner went and after a long discussion, we all agreed that in order for a better decision to be made, we should look into this company’s website in detail and she should ask them for a formal proposal of what the partnership might cover,” she adds.
Additionally, Emely believes that she has made a big progress and she has gained a lot of knowledge. “When I set the goals for my internship I decided that I wanted to learn how to apply my knowledge from Berea into the real world, I wanted to learn how to code in Java so that I could work on mobile applications for the organization and I also wanted to improve when working in teams. We just got done with week seven and I think I have actively work on my goals every day and even though there have been hardships, I have kept trying and I have become more confident in Java,” she says.
Giorgi Lomia has also made progress. “This week, I was focusing on translating the darkflow model to original darknet format. I wrote the parser that goes through darkflow format annotations and converts them into darknet annotation format. It was very satisfying to see the flow of the annotations. In addition to that, I used a labelling tool to confirm the numbers of a ground truth labels to the reformatted version to see if my math was correct, and I have successfully confirmed that the values were the same within the acceptable margin of error,” he explains.
According to Ola, the time working for KwF passed by very quickly. “I have just finished my seventh week working for Kashmir World Foundation. It is unbelievable how fast the time passes. It feels like yesterday when I first came to Reston and started working for Kashmir World Foundation. This week was definitely very interesting and eventful. We had to change our marketing strategy because our previous marketing efforts were not as succesful as expected. It was a bit daunting, but great learning experience to have flexibility to make changes versus cancel a program. I understand it is a part of my learning process, so I am going to make sure that I am doing everything I can to take advantage of every opportunity this internship has to offer. I think it is a valuable lesson for me, because I was a part of Kashmir World Foundation for a most of their promotion and I had a chance to create and implement different marketing strategies. I am very grateful for the opportunity to be a part of that, because it was my first professional marketing experience,” she says. “I am very excited for my last three weeks working for Kashmir World Foundation,” she adds.
Giorgi, Emely and Ola are definitely very excited about their work and the progress they have made so far. They have been working very hard since they came and they have been taking up many interesting tasks, which allows them to learn a lot. They have a few more weeks left and they are looking forward to their new assignments.