The undergraduate research office, by helping expose me to programs like UCARE, gave me the opportunity to develop skills that I am directly able to apply to my publications, work, and soon, graduate studies. The great flexibility I was afforded within economics too, only constrained by how well I could present my work to my supervising faculty, gave me the space to pursue economic research creatively as well.
Publications:“‘Vox Populi?:’ Assessing NATO Favorability Relative to Political and Economic Indicators in Selected Member Nations.” Undergraduate Economic Review.I treated survey data on NATO popularity in several countries around the world (both member and non-member countries) as functions of political and economic variables, building on the intuition that worse-performing economies will lead to less support for international cooperatives. I used data from the Pew Research Center and German Marshall Fund, building models which demonstrated evidence that unemployment rates, GDP per capita, and trade levels can predict NATO popularity moreso than the actual militarization of a given country. “Governance in the Global Economy.” Stanford Economic Review.
I wrote an article arguing that trade is too often relied upon for international democratic reform, as evidenced by China (failed trade incentives) or Russia (failed trade punishments).
Undergraduate research award for honors thesis:“Participating in Research Days allowed me to communicate my research succinctly, in a way I couldn’t otherwise (as I hope could be expected, given the 90-page thesis),” he said. “It was great to break out of my statistics-and-theory bubble and talk about my work with biology students, or engineering faculty, or janitors in the Union just passing by.”
More information here: https://arts.unl.edu/music/news/undergraduate-research-award-presented
Grad school:I will be pursuing a masters degree in international development at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
