By Maya Kostov
After receiving his bachelor degree in both Quantitative Social Science and Government and working as a senior research associate at the MIT Election and Data Science Lab, Alexander Agadjanian (TPA ‘14) has now started his PhD program in Political Science at University of California-Berkeley. He has also received the National Science Foundation fellowship, which is a prestigious 5-year fellowship that covers three years of funding while in graduate school.
In Alexander’s specialty, he studies political psychology, political behavior, and race in American Politics. His goal is to become a political science professor. His favorite topic to look at is why people hold beliefs about politics the way they do and why they behave in politics (e.g. vote) the way they do. He does a ton of experiments and collecting data from surveys to get quantitative results.
Fun fact about Alexander: He was actually on the De Equitibus staff when he was at TPA! Although he did not end up pursuing journalism as a career, he does write articles about his research in newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post. One recent example of his writing was a paper about partisans in the U.S. titled “Following the Leader” when they form their opinions about policy issues. He has also written about other data analyses like about the types of factors that drive Americans’ decisions on who to vote for in elections.
Alexander says that he thinks writing on De Equitibus really helped him “nurture a love for writing that has stayed with me since high school and through the present day.”
Since Alexander is starting grad school this year, he definitely has a hard schedule to manage. He has classes in quantitative methods, experiments in politics, and the study of political representation, not to mention some research on the side too.
Alexander recently presented at the American Political Science Association annual conference about a study he has with some co-authors about Americans’ racial attitudes.
Alexander believes you must “find out what you’re passionate about, and once you do, act on it. Do as much as you can in terms of learning about your passion and producing some output.”
When he was at TPA, he wanted to be a sports journalist. Besides being on the school newspaper staff, and even had his own sports blog website. He wrote a lot of analyses of different sports, gave his opinions, and read as many sports websites, magazines, and books known to man.
It was not until he got to college that he was exposed to data and politics and thought he might want to do something else. He started reading more political blogs and academic journals, and started his own politics blog website. This website is where he utilizes his writing skills the most, again giving his opinions, coding up data analysis, and just general political topics that he found interesting.
Alexander reflects that “Maintaining this habit of putting my thoughts into words and playing around with data helped me think deeper about the things I was interested in, and it both fed and expanded my curiosities.” Strive to be passionately curious!