If you've been clicking through my portfolio in chronological order, you might have noticed that this is the end of the road. Don't worry, I came back for my fourth year and fully intend to graduate, but I still see my thesis as the most meaningful culmination of my undergraduate studies. My senior year has been more focused on setting up my future, applying to and then selecting graduate programs, finishing graduation requirements, and enjoying the community I've found in Seattle as much as I can before I leave than on putting in the kind of single-minded, marathon-intensity study and writing days my thesis required. I'm still amazed at the unexpected journey the writing process turned out to be, and I look forward to pursuing graduate degrees and going on this kind of journey again. So in a sense, this page is the end of the road, but it's much more a beginning.
"The struggles of research - from the surreal stress dreams about data entry to the bottomless rabbit holes of literature reviews - are worth it to me for the exciting moments of discovery and the ability to share knowledge that I've created with others who care about it."
In the autumn quarter of my junior year, I began research for my thesis in a graduate-level Political Science class I used for ad hoc Interdisciplinary Honors credit. The class concerned social science research design, and the final project was a research proposal paper. As a newly minted upperclassman, I was incredibly intimidated by my classmates, all PhD students who knew more or less what they wanted to study while I had only the vaguest idea of what I would write about. After hours of reading searching for a research question, I stumbled upon an article discussing how state-level campaign finance regulations affected welfare spending that lamented the paucity of research on how campaign financing practices affected other policy outcomes. I discovered an entire body of literature on the link between socioeconomic inequality and policy responsiveness in the U.S. and realized that this kind of research was essential to understanding the mechanisms that made politicians more accountable to some of their constituents over others. I spent the rest of the quarter learning how to speak intelligibly about Citizens United, donor disclosure laws, pubic election financing, and regression analysis, and ended up with a proposal my professor, Dr. Mark A. Smith, encouraged me to develop into an actual article.
With Professor Smith's help and further advising from Professor Michael McCann in the LSJ program, I spent my spring and summer quarters that year figuring out how to not just speak intelligibly about, but actually do social science research. I had recurring dreams that I was trapped inside an Excel spreadsheet after hours of data entry, taught myself how to use R and LaTex to perform and display the results of my statistical analysis, and realized, once I had results that implied a causal relationship between increased regulation and more progressive income taxes, that my findings actually had important political and legal implications. When Professor Smith and Professor McCann spent the first half of my defense pointing out important omissions in the paper, I thought I would have to revise and resubmit it to them - but then they spent the second half giving me advice on which PhD programs I should apply to. The defense was symbolic of the entire process of writing my thesis: it was hands-down both the most challenging and most affirming thing I've done as a student at UW. Furthermore, it's pointed me down the path I will pursue as a graduate student - first in pursuit of a Master's degree in research methods at the University of Oxford next year, and then working towards a PhD in American Politics at UC Berkeley. I realized that the struggles of research - from the surreal stress dreams about data entry to the bottomless rabbit holes of literature reviews - are worth it to me for the exciting moments of discovery and the ability to share knowledge that I've created with others who care about it.
With Professor Smith's help and further advising from Professor Michael McCann in the LSJ program, I spent my spring and summer quarters that year figuring out how to not just speak intelligibly about, but actually do social science research. I had recurring dreams that I was trapped inside an Excel spreadsheet after hours of data entry, taught myself how to use R and LaTex to perform and display the results of my statistical analysis, and realized, once I had results that implied a causal relationship between increased regulation and more progressive income taxes, that my findings actually had important political and legal implications. When Professor Smith and Professor McCann spent the first half of my defense pointing out important omissions in the paper, I thought I would have to revise and resubmit it to them - but then they spent the second half giving me advice on which PhD programs I should apply to. The defense was symbolic of the entire process of writing my thesis: it was hands-down both the most challenging and most affirming thing I've done as a student at UW. Furthermore, it's pointed me down the path I will pursue as a graduate student - first in pursuit of a Master's degree in research methods at the University of Oxford next year, and then working towards a PhD in American Politics at UC Berkeley. I realized that the struggles of research - from the surreal stress dreams about data entry to the bottomless rabbit holes of literature reviews - are worth it to me for the exciting moments of discovery and the ability to share knowledge that I've created with others who care about it.