What skills do students learn in
political science?
All of our courses focus on writing
skills, they focus on
general communication skills,
most of our upper levels require 
presentations or some type of public
speaking that would help develop that.  In
the internship program we're working on
professionalisation skills so helping
students have those soft skills that are
needed in the marketplace to have them
be successful.  The mock trial program
obviously teaches them public speaking
skills in addition to that persuasion
skills and that would come up in a lot
of the different classes.
How does your research inform your teaching?
I've been working on this research project,  we look at the two thousand eight election,
where we were led to believe that McCain
might actually stand a chance but once
the election occurred he didn't.  So what
we did is we went back and we looked at
all the polls that were in the media for
five months prior to the election.  We
compared them to all the actual polls
that were done to see if the media
hand-picked ones that made the race more
interesting and that's exactly what we
found.
We may look at, in a research methods
course or course related to terrorism,
how does terrorism really effect the
average citizen, the average voter?  How does
effect maybe their anxiety, their
behavior, their voting behavior at times.
Also looking at what causes terrorism, 
why do individuals carry out terrorist
attacks at times and from that
standpoint trying to prevent terrorist
attacks into the future.
What kind of internships do you offer?
We have a wonderful state legislative internship program.
It's run through the Office of 
Government Relations in the
university and they actually work for
the university as ambassadors for the university.
They moved down to Atlanta in the spring,
they take the internship for course
credit,  they take that
professionalisation class that helps
build their soft skills, they track
legislation, they become the university's
eyes and ears for legislation.
We do a program that involves two students, one follows healthcare related issues,
one follows education related issues and
they see the legislative process in its truest form.
What do you like best about studying political science?
I would say that the information rarely is static.  Things often change in the news,
you can like different events they're curved in
the daily new cycle, such as your
the election between Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton.  If there's terrorist events
that are occurring, looks for the causes
and effects of those.  Something's always
Something's always happening in the news related to the field.
I think the general public's always
interested in what's happening
in political science.  And I think that
can relate directly to the classroom
because these students see these events in
the news every day.
To learn more, visit us in the Department of Political Science at Augusta University.
