By my final week at CUF, I realized that the skills I had developed were much broader than the research skills I expected to build going into the summer. I had worked on housing and economic mobility research, but I had also helped with outreach, scheduling, event preparation, briefing materials, contact management, follow-ups, and all of the smaller administrative pieces that kept projects moving. Toward the end, I spent time organizing files and notes, cleaning up contact and research trackers, and making sure the work I had been involved in was easy for the team to continue using after I left.

I think the biggest thing I took away was learning how to operate in a real team where there was rarely only one task happening at a time. I became much better at switching between research and logistics, figuring out what needed attention first, communicating when something changed, and taking ownership without waiting for very specific instructions. I also became more detail-oriented because I saw how something as small as the wrong time in a schedule or an outdated contact could create problems later. My LiA started because I wanted to connect my research on housing and segregation in Gujarat to urban policy in New York, but the experience ended up teaching me just as much about execution. Good ideas and good research mattered, but someone still had to organize the information, coordinate the people, follow up, and make sure the project actually happened. That was a side of policy work I had never really seen before.