During the fall, my internship was disorganized and there wasn't a clear delegation of work. Towards the end of the fall and early spring, I focused on pushing my supervisors to provide clearer guidelines so that I could maximize my productivity and impact. Since then, I've met with the mayor's supervisor for community and economic development every week. I've also had a clearer delegation of tasks which has allowed me to focus on tangibly productive work.
The task I recently completed involved creating an automatic system for retrieving property information across different government sites to evaluate the necessity of actions against blighted and vacant properties. While working in government and legal offices, I've noticed that operational efficiency, especially in regards to automation, is a struggle. I had a goal to use parts of my CS adjacent background to remedy this issue, and that drove me to automate the procedure for retrieving property data. If the city was looking to collect data on a dozen or so homes, completing the task manually would have been sufficient, but the city needed to pour over thousands of properties, making a manual solution costly for a cash-strapped government office.
Working towards automating property data collection taught me methods for gathering information from different websites with clunky at best interfaces which I can apply in other situations. I was able to move closer towards my goal of boosting efficiency, both by improving the efficiency of completing this one (albeit long) task and by learning how to automate similar tasks in the future.