Simon Page

Summary:

Hello! My name is Simon Page, and I graduated from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor in August, 2020, with a degree in Political Science, minor in Applied Statistics (Statistical Computing). My skills exist in data management, analysis, and visualization in R, a statistical computing coding language. With these skills in R, I have done the following in a professional setting:

• Research for the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan on their Constituency Level Election Archive (CLEA). Here, I collect and clean lower house, upper house, and presidential election data from around the globe. My position mostly involves development of nationalization scripts in R, which compute measures to analyze levels of nationalization. These measures are useful in answering questions such as "what are the effective number of parties in [insert country]?" or "are constituents being effectively represented in [insert country]?" In CLEA Release 14 (slated for late 2020), the nationalization measures computed will be directly from me (here). Moreover, these measures will be used by superiors for future scholarship in Political Science literature.

• I also worked under a then-graduate student, now Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech's School of Public Policy (here) on a project concerning cyber crime and cybersecurity analysis. In this role, I conducted research on cyber capabilities around the globe, aggregating to a qualitative data set, in hopes of comparing cyber capabilities of countries, as well as their ability to respond to a cyber threat/cyber attack. I also developed a survey/survey questions in this role in order to gauge public understanding of cyber attacks and cybersecurity for a baseline in our research.

• I have other experience in an academic research setting at the University of Michigan, where I worked on a large team to update old social science literature. More-specifically, we worked to recreate John Wright's work on unemployment and the perceived Democratic-advantage when unemployment is high: the paper (here) crucially asks questions such as "are Democrats electorally advantaged when unemployment is high?" and "do Democrats have ownership over unemployment as an issue? Do people find them to be the party to handle Unemployment?" Our team was interested in these questions in their application to the Obama Administration/early Trump Administration (given the paper only uses data up to 2008). In this role, I collected, managed, and merged a great deal of electoral data; I also recreated a number of visualizations from the original paper. This work is currently under review, and if it passes, I will be included as a Research Assistant in published Political Science literature.

• Finally, I have experience in local politics after I worked on Gretchen Whitmer's Campaign for Governor. As a Field Intern/Event Coordinator, I made countless phone calls, knocked on myriad of doors, and lead a great number of volunteer events across the state of Michigan to get now-Governor Whitmer elected. At volunteer events, Governor Whitmer's campaign manager and I lead people interested in the campaign on Governor Whitmer's platform, and we explained how to fill out petition signatures. I developed a number of skills here, mostly revolving around a large-team office setting. I also gained a number of outreach-strategy skills and working under heavy pressure to get people to turnout to events, and of course, to vote!