Busy, Busy week

Since I came onto my engagement at the GAO in its beginning stages, things had started off a bit slow. However, last week was particularly busy for our team as we are entering the design phase of our project. Our engagement relates to higher education endowments. We have really been focusing on finding good data sources for information, and most importantly, assessing their reliability. The GAO generally does audits of government agencies/programs, and basically has a protocol for everything that happens during a project. Part of this set of protocols is having an entrance conference with the agencies the GAO is auditing. Our project is not an audit, but we still have to entrance conference with the agencies that will have a role in the project.

We ended up having 2 entrance conferences and an additional interview last week. Between these and the mission team picnic, the week was incredibly busy and went by very quickly. It was pretty exciting to leave the building and interview other agencies, mainly because it was a nice change of pace from the background research. These meeting were also quite informative. After each interview we also have to write up a record of what happened, because everything that is mentioned in a GAO report has to be verified with a source. These interview write-ups can be challenging since it's not easy to catch everything that is being said, particularly in long interviews. It is also difficult to summarize all of the information in a useful way, since the goal of the write-up is just to convey the main points, not to transcribe the whole interview. Not only do you have to summarize the meeting effectively, but you also have to format it properly so that all of the information is easily understood and organized well.

Aside from the interviews of last week, we are continuing with the background research/literature review. However, this is taking somewhat of a backseat as we are also working on our project design which is becoming our top priority now. So far I am enjoying this phase of the engagement. My internship ends in a few weeks, and I will be sad to miss the actual implementation of our project design. However, my supervisors have said that I may be able to come back from time to time for important project meetings so that I can have a sense of what happens after I leave.