Dean Shamess

Dean Shamess, a PhD candidate in Public Policy who studies research funding and the effects of funding on long-term outcomes, discusses how the Summer Program provided him with a different, interdisciplinary outlook on his work and research.

I chose to attend the Summer Program at the urging of the supervisor of my PhD committee. He had been a participant in the past, and also been a teaching assistant. He and I had very similar backgrounds in that we had gone to smaller institutions for undergrad and even ended up at fairly small PhD programs. So he imparted to me that this is an opportunity to not only develop skills and get that fundamental training that is always great to have, but to also really develop my confidence to learn that I can make contributions to social science, and that I would be able to carve out a future in this field, and that I wasn't confined to these smaller or less prestigious spaces just because that's where I'd come from.

Immediate payoff of attending

I was a participant for two sessions last summer, and I'm an instructional aide this summer. After I left as a participant, I immediately refined the methods in a paper I had been working on for my dissertation. We ended up with a much, much better research product because of that. Some things that I'll use from here and developed here include softer skills like networking. I've met a ton of great co-participants, instructors, and other TAs who I still keep in contact with and talk with, some of whom I'm working on projects with now. And these are opportunities that would not have existed otherwise.

Understanding material from any perspective

The great thing about being here is that you learn, in a general sense, these are ways to think about methodological questions. These are ways to implement them and how we do them and test them, and you can come out with a thoughtful, rigorous research product, whether that's for publications or professional work or whatever it might be. One of the greatest experiences I've had here was the chance to talk to my TAs and instructors and say, "Here's a problem I'm trying to work on in my space, and we're talking about this in class today and I can see how they relate, but there's this little wrinkle here that we haven't talked about. Can we talk about that in class tomorrow? Or can you help me through it?" And everyone here has always been so willing to help in that sense. A big part of the ethos here is trying to go that extra step, which sometimes means five minutes and sometimes a couple of hours, but trying to go that extra step to make sure that whatever it is that the class is about actually does fit into what participants are trying to get out of this program.

On the benefits of an interdisciplinary program

I'm enrolled in a PhD program in Public Policy, and the tricky thing about public policy degrees is that they are inherently interdisciplinary in a way that sometimes is hard to define. The reason I bring that up is because here you're working with people who are often political scientists, but also sociologists, policy scholars, statisticians, economists: the whole gamut. Mostly in the social sciences, but also sometimes not. It's an invaluable opportunity to interact with people across disciplinary boundaries. You hear a different perspective on an issue than you had considered before, which is on its own great, but it can be a much more tangible thing as well. You don't just get this different perspective; suddenly you can view an issue in your area of research in a way that will enrich things you're already doing. I can almost guarantee you, you'll see things in a much richer way than you did before, and your own work will benefit from that.

"You don't just get this different perspective; suddenly you can view an issue in your area of research in a way that will enrich things you're already doing. I can almost guarantee you, you'll see things in a much richer way than you did before, and your own work will benefit from that.