Hello everyone!
As I previously mentioned, my internship is at the ICS, which is the Social Science Department of the University of Lisbon. I am working with a professor and helping her on her research project on the members of parliament in Ghana and South Africa. I basically am going into this blind and with no previous background information, which is pretty cool because I am a pretty clean slate and have nothing to unlearn, I have no biases or opinions that could impact the work I am doing. My first “mini” research project is doing biographical data extraction on every single member of parliament in Ghana and South Africa. Piece of cake? Well not exactly, because there are over 700 MPs in both parliaments combined, so the data collection has definitely been slow. I am hoping to get more involved in the actual research process, even though I know what I am doing is useful and meaningful to the overall project. I will keep everyone updated on my findings and the progress of my research! Yippee!
The way my internship is structured is that I have three in-person days and the other two days can be completely remote, which is pretty awesome and I am very grateful to have a supervisor who is both passionate about her work, and flexible and understanding that I am a college student exploring a new country for the first time. I have been having a great time visiting new cafes around Lisbon on my remote days and seeing new neighborhoods.
My friends and I have been taking full advantage of our Transportation Pass, and safe to say we are big fans of the beach. We went to this beach town called Cascais (pronounced Kas-Kaish), which is a subway ride to the train station and then an hour train ride to get to, but so so worth it! Everyone was off on Wednesday for another national holiday, and the collective mindset was to get to the ocean as soon as possible. We have also learned that the ocean is absolutely freezing but so worth jumping in.
Friday night was the biggest party across Lisbon, and we had fun going to the city center and exploring all the festivals that were going on. Saturday was our first program-wide field trip where we got to go on a historic boat and jump into a cove accessible only via water, eat a delicious traditional Portuguese lunch, and go on a wine tour!
