"Working on the Mass Movements project has continued to provide me with new opportunities for growth."
In my sophomore, junior, and senior years, I've worked as a research analyst on the Mass Movements Database Project, which is housed in the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance under the leadership of Professor Stephen Kosack and involves around ten other researchers at a given time. The project aims to compile a comprehensive database of all political movements of at least 1,000 people that lasted at least one month in all countries worldwide over the past two centuries - a monumental task! I research political movements in assigned countries and meet with a research partner weekly to discuss our findings. The project uses a consensus model, meaning that my partner and I have to agree on every decision we make on which movements should be coded for inclusion in the database and how we should code each variable we use to characterize movements. In the past year, I've also worked as a moderator for these meetings, using the nuanced understanding of our variable list I've developed as a coder to facilitate other researchers' discussions.
Working on the Mass Movements project has continued to provide me with new opportunities for growth throughout my undergraduate years. As a sophomore, I learned how to concisely formulate compelling arguments to explain my coding decisions to my research partner, a law student at Columbia. I remember being so excited the first time we started out with different opinions and I convinced him to go with the decision I'd made! As a junior, I began thinking about the project as an aspiring scholar, appreciating the rigor of the consensus model for gathering human-coded data and starting to understand how many exciting ways other researchers will be able to use that data. As a senior, stepping into the moderator role gave me leadership experience and an opportunity to share the expertise I'd developed. The artifact below is a poster about the coding process that I presented at the 2017 Undergraduate Research Symposium as a Mary Gates Research Scholar, another way I was able to share some of the things I'd learned as an analyst on the project.
Working on the Mass Movements project has continued to provide me with new opportunities for growth throughout my undergraduate years. As a sophomore, I learned how to concisely formulate compelling arguments to explain my coding decisions to my research partner, a law student at Columbia. I remember being so excited the first time we started out with different opinions and I convinced him to go with the decision I'd made! As a junior, I began thinking about the project as an aspiring scholar, appreciating the rigor of the consensus model for gathering human-coded data and starting to understand how many exciting ways other researchers will be able to use that data. As a senior, stepping into the moderator role gave me leadership experience and an opportunity to share the expertise I'd developed. The artifact below is a poster about the coding process that I presented at the 2017 Undergraduate Research Symposium as a Mary Gates Research Scholar, another way I was able to share some of the things I'd learned as an analyst on the project.