I will graduate August of this year, having defended my dissertation on July 8th (2024). In my time as a Teaching Assistant at UTD, I have taught various numerous political science courses at UTD (that is, I am the instructor of record). Being an instructor has fostered my ability to effectively teach new material to others- to make difficult concepts understandable to students of a variety of backgrounds. My time at UTD has not only cultivated my expertise as an instructor, but also my ability to effectively clean, analyze, and interpret big data as a social scientist. My research delves mostly into the behavioral side of political science. Specifically, my research in the past few years focuses on the influence culture has on politics and vice versa. This particularly involves evolving attitudes regarding free speech in the “cancel culture” era, which is the topic of my dissertation. In studying “cancel culture” events, I examine over 130,000 tweets to explore which Twitter users are the most influential. I perform network analysis and content analysis to address the important research question of identifying the main actors who initiate and engage in online cancel culture events. I have also written a short paper analyzing YouTube comments from various videos on the 2020 US Presidential debates; I recently received it back as a revise and resubmit to the journal Research and Politics. In addition to being proficient in analyzing social media data, I am well-trained in designing, collecting, analyzing, visualizing, and interpreting survey data. In 2018, I was tasked with creating and implementing a survey design in one of my courses. My chosen topic was exploring political attitudes of Evangelical voters. To gather data, I reached out to various churches, Christian organizations, and homeschool organizations in the state of Texas. While there are of course some concerns with generalizability with this snowball sample, my efforts resulted in a sample of about 400 respondents. Since then, I have helped colleagues at UTD design and implement survey questions (Dr. Marianne Stewart, Dr. Karl Ho, and Dr. Euel Elliott- references if needed). Recently, with UTD’s survey project COMETrends, I had a series of experiment questions accepted for my dissertation. Here, I presented respondents with randomized scenarios to determine the conditions under which "regular" people will agree to "cancel" someone. These are just a few of my research projects at UTD. I am highly skilled and experienced in data management, including creating, processing, proofing, and visualization. I am proficient with Microsoft Suite, and many other programs like R, Stata, Python, Tableau, etc. And, I can efficiently process and analyze survey data, ensuring accuracy in weighting results and quality checks to reflect true demographic representations.
Yes!
