The first time Mr Alick Chibanthowa asked me to produce the minimum and maximum temperature forecasts for the daily weather bulletin, I felt the weight of it immediately. These were not practice exercises. They were going out to the entire country. I made the forecasts, submitted them, we went over them together, made some minor adjustments, and they went into the bulletin. I felt like I was living up to the title for the first time.

In the weeks that followed, whenever he was on duty, he would push me toward tasks outside my comfort zone. Madam Brenda Mdzagada Soko did the same. So did others at the department. They wanted the interns to learn, and being someone who wanted to learn, I absorbed everything I could.

DCCMS operates a network of over 120 weather stations across Malawi, 21 manned and over 100 automated. Every week, data from all of them needs to be quality-checked, processed, and turned into something usable. I was part of that process, working on weekly and monthly climate analyses and contributing to national bulletins distributed to government ministries and agricultural agencies.

One of the daily products we produced was a Special Weather Forecast Report for a logistics company covering multiple points along their railroad route. The report involves running an R script that extracts forecasts from an API and populates an Excel sheet designed to export as a Word document or PDF. The script runs, the sheet populates, but then you still have to produce wind, precipitation, and temperature forecasts for the next three days manually. Mess up a formula in the sheet, fail to check whether the script ran correctly, and the report goes out wrong. It has happened. I fixed a formula error once by drafting a manual correction and printing it out. It is still pinned on one of the boards in the office.

What the National Meteorological Center (NMC) taught me about verification is simple: you check each other's work before anything goes to a stakeholder. The data is only as trustworthy as the process behind it.

We studied how climate science intersects with other fields in our undergraduate coursework. I knew this theoretically. Sitting in stakeholder meetings at DCCMS showed me how vast those intersections actually are. Red Cross, World Bank representatives, UNDP, NORCAP, UNICEF, WFP. The conversations in those rooms covered agricultural planning, disaster response, infrastructure, food security. The same underlying data, serving completely different decisions. As a student intern you cannot speak for the department, but they made sure to include us, and I paid attention to every room I was allowed into.

I came back for a second term in March 2026, this time in the Engineering and Communication division, with other duties in the NMC. The first term was not enough. There is still so much to learn, and I am still learning. I studied meteorology and climate science for four years and the work I do now sits at the intersection of that training and everything else I have built since. That does not separate me from the roots. At the core, I am a climate scientist.