I conducted more intensive research than ever before; where previously I'd worked on research papers for classes, the tight schedule of the quarter system never allowed me to explore a topic as much as I would've liked. Here, though, I spent months poring over thousands upon thousands of pages of academic articles, official government reports, quantitative studies, allegorical accounts, and budget summaries. In doing this, I developed the ability to fit extensive amounts of information into a greater framework and relate them to each other without my information becoming jumbled. I simultaneously became far more competent at writing reports for publication, along with creating new figures and graphs from raw data. I'm generally a flowery writer by nature, and struggled at first to adapt my languages to the concise and objective style that many NGOs prefer for fact reports. After months of writing and ongoing feedback from my supervisors, I improved my professional writing skills through hands-on practice. This was also my first brush with the behemoth task of preparing a report for journal publication, which I now consider myself very adept with. The tedium of understanding unique style requirements, properly labeling figures, and preparing a manuscript for submission with all the appropriate acknowledgments and disclaimers was exhausting, but will help me invaluably in my future as a researcher. In this vein, I'm also familiar with specific sites and services now for finding relevant journals, and recognize niche jargon about journal access and reach statistics.
I conducted more intensive research than ever before, spending months synthesizing thousands of pages of academic articles, government reports, and quantitative studies. I transformed my flowery writing style into the concise, objective tone NGOs require for publication, learning to create figures from raw data and prepare manuscripts for journal submission with proper formatting, acknowledgments, and disclaimers. This experience made me far more competent in professional research writing and gave me practical fluency in navigating journal databases and understanding publication metrics.