Some More Reflections on Journey So Far
I always make it a habit of keeping track of my own journey through academia and semi-professional life in blogs over the years. Tonight spurred me to reflect a bit more, specifically on a particular decision I made with rather momentous consequences.
Once upon a time, I thought that I was going to get a PhD in international relations. I was a PhD student at American University, working partly under my early mentor Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and winding my way through my methods and coursework sequence. I had just completed a MA in Security Studies from Georgetown University and a BA in International Relations from Occidental College back in California. It seemed like the natural path, given that I didn’t want to go abroad for a PhD in War Studies or Strategic Studies for a variety of reasons (I did not want to make my then-girlfriend — and now wife — move and I also felt like PhDs in the European system were more geared towards people with a hard thesis proposal in mind). And then, in Spring 2013, fellow SSP alum Aaron Frank talked me into considering and later moving to a PhD program in Computational Social Science at George Mason University after talks with some faculty there proved receptive and welcoming.
Objectively, it was a crazy decision. It would increase time to completion as I would have to learn a radically different set of theoretical literature and skills all over again. Though I was somewhat well-read in philosophical literature about computing, I had really never worked with computers under the hood. Something else I would learn was just how painful it would be to go from something I felt some degree of confidence in — writing essays, doing case studies, etc — to a much more engineering mindset in which almost everyone in my program was far better than I could be. Also, while being a political scientist suggested a clear set of research designs and norms of scholarly practice, I had no idea what “computational social science” was. It seemed to me to be a jury-rigged mixture of varying theoretical disciplines and methodological tools that originated outside the social sciences.
In time, though, I came to see one prominent reason why I had made the choice. I had worked for many years to amass substantive knowledge in strategic studies and war studies, areas that sometimes fall under the aegis of political science but have dramatically different theoretical traditions, questions, and approaches. Going to a PhD program oriented around computational methodology gave me the freedom to learn and use a number of tools to study that through the digital computer, a machine that could act as a blank slate for me to fill in. That didn’t mean that it was easy to do work with computation — I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years doing reading and reflection in an effort to try to bridge what I often feel is a gap between the way I learned about strategy (historical case studies and verbal theories) and the methodologies and ideas I am learning today. It did get easier when I read about the history of Cold War social, behavioral, and computational sciences, giving me a kind of history and set of notional ancestors. But I don’t really consider myself a political scientist anymore simply for the reason that I was always a strategy researcher first.
A lot has happened. My girlfriend is now my wife, I’ve stumbled and fell on my face a bunch of times as I’ve had to bootstrap much of my education, and I’ve learned a lot about I increasingly have come to regard as an interdisciplinary set of sciences concerned with rationality, decision-making, and computation. Perhaps that has been the most rewarding aspect of my education, as through all of this combination of hill-climbing and random search in my own educational state space I’ve met a lot of fascinating people from all manner of scientific disciplines that I would never have otherwise talked to or encountered. Whatever happens next, I at least feel that I am getting the education that I have always dreamed of — and a foundation for lifelong learning and exploration.
