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A Research Study On Terrorism And Responses Of Terrorism

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I concluded my internship on the last day of class at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, commonly referred to as START. Within START, I worked on the INSPIRE team. The INSPIRE research team looks at how civilians utilize social media to share sentiments about political elections in sub-Saharan African countries in the past two years. Each intern at START is required to complete a final project or research paper, applying the knowledge we have learned from working with our supervisors this semester. There are four interns on the INSPIRE team, so we paired into groups of two for the final project. My partner, Brooke, and I conducted a smaller scale visual sentiment analysis of the US election using …show more content…

This semester, I was able to view issues affecting the region through citizens’ sentiments on social media. My initial goal, starting the internship, was to get exposure to research and see what the work life of a researcher looks like. As an economics major, I have taken quantitative courses, including statistics, but never had the opportunity to see the real world applications. Overall, I got to refine and practice my writing skills. I learned the about the overlap between writing in academia and research reports. Because of the lessons I learned over the past few months, I would consider the internship a success. I learned to make the best of it, even during times when I was not pleased with different issues in the office. Having other interns working on my project helped me cope with the deadlines because we would help each other with any tasks that we were stuck on.

There were many frustrating times where I felt that I was not making the best of my time as an intern. During the first few weeks of my internship, before learning to work with my co-interns, I was not knowledgeable on some of the terminology. I felt that I did not have the skills necessary to be a good intern. I found that I needed more technical knowledge than I had, but felt that I was not at fault because I made that clear during my interview with my supervisor, Erin. From my previous internship and classes on campus, I knew

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