:Polisci Applied

Okay, not really memoirs per se. Still, my writing something here is long overdue, so here goes:

I just completed my first quarter of study at Stanford, acquiring some small portion of the knowledge that will one day hopefully get me a job somewhere, or something. The most notable thing about grad school is the ridiculous reading load - multiple courses assigning multiple (complete or almost complete) books (plus academic articles, etc.) per week. Between the hundreds of pages of reading, plus the fact that I am getting acclimated to a new area of the country, updating this site fell to the wayside.

And now, to be honest, I don’t have anything terribly prodigious to say. Mostly I wanted to verify that I do still intend to do things with this site, in case anybody out there is reading (unlikely I know). Further, as time passes (e.g. once I get through my core courses) I hope to recruit a few other folks to write here as well, in order to provide a variety of perspectives (as well as semi-regular updates).

What have I learned in my studies thus far? Well, I’ve read a lot, as I said, and while I cannot claim to remember all (or even much) of it, I do have a better feel of political science literature now. I have a decent chance of at least recognizing the name of important authors in international relations and comparative politics, and maybe even placing them in whatever general philosophical category they belong in.

Mostly, as with all education, I acquired tools and experience. The professors have all pushed a very methodical way of viewing problems in polisci - figure out your puzzle in terms of the dependent variable (DV, what you want to explain) and the independent variable(s) (IV, what you think explains it). Whether or not you apply actual stats or formal modeling, this conceptualization is necessary if you want to have a valid argument in the social sciences.

And with that, I want to pass along two interesting writings, one by my professor for international relations this past quarter and one by my professor for comparative politics. The former, Jim Fearon (considered an expert in civil war and formal modeling), appeared before a congressional committee earlier this year and gave testimony regarding the state of affairs in Iraq (warning: PDF). The latter, David Laitin (also a civil war guy, he and Jim and cowritten papers on the topic) recently wrote an op-ed about the Iraq Study Group report.

As far as writing some original stuff for this site, I do intend to do that in the near future (it is my break for a few weeks, after all). I may adapt and post some bits from papers I’ve written this quarter, as a few were on topics pertinent to the real world and not just academia. In any case, thank you for reading, and stay tuned for more political science themed ranting and raving.