Mike Yourkowski, candidate for the Alaska state senate, steered the Kittiwake II, a seventy three foot fishing boat, smoothly into Seldovia's port. Nestled below the glaciers of the Kenai Mountains, the small fishing town was only an hour journey across Kachemak bay from our campaign headquarters in Homer, but my stomach was queasy. I had proposed this whistle-stop boat tour several weeks earlier and was nervous how it would turn out. Having a reporter and photographer from Alaska's largest newspaper on board only made the tension greater. I had staked the success of the campaign on this trip.
"Home run!" barked Daniel, a campaign volunteer, throwing open the door to our office several weeks later. Above his head he held a copy of the Anchorage Daily News, with a head-line reading "Challenger dogs Murkowski pick." Below the headline was a picture of Mike, his wife, and their two-year old stepping off the boat. The tour was a huge success: my candidate's face in everyone's living room that morning. I stopped addressing envelopes long enough to tack the newspaper up on the wall and smile. Then it was back to work.
Running the Yourkowski for State Senate campaign in 2004 was not my first foray into politics. In 2002, I was a sophomore Psychology and Computer Science major, home for summer break. I walked into Senator Paul Wellstone's re-election campaign headquarters to see if they needed someone to stamp envelopes or answer the phone. Immediately, I was hooked on the excitement, the urgency, the connection to people, the strategy, and the uncertainty of a campaign. The next day, I was at the office again at 9 a.m. sharp, not leaving until after the sun had set. My volunteer position quickly became an internship. As an intern I quickly became the office database expert and was offered a staff position providing data management and targeted voter modeling.
The campaign reaffirmed my commitment to technology as a tool to inform our thinking about political activities. My primary duty as Data Manager for the Wellstone campaign was turning theoretical models of voter behavior into concrete database applications, leading to more effective "Get Out The Vote" efforts in low income and minority neighborhoods. The campaign showed me the value of my technical skills in research, specifically in modeling political processes.
After taking a semester leave to stay on with the campaign, I returned to my undergraduate studies a changed person. While I was an accomplished Psychology student, having been inducted into Psi Chi, the national psychology honor society, the previous semester, I knew that Political Science was the discipline I could truly engage. I had always been drawn to the puzzle of human decision making and the rigor of testing hypotheses through experimentation. After the campaign, these general interests became concrete questions: why did people make the political decisions that they did? How could I test the hypotheses I developed on the campaign trail? What did academics know that could benefit campaigners? Was the outcome I saw in Minnesota a foregone conclusion based on factors outside the campaign's control?
Being a practical person, I was not content only to study politics and computers. I returned to the hectic world of electoral politics in 2004. The Alaska Democratic Party recruited me to run the state senate campaign of a city councilman from the small fishing town of Homer. The district included three separate land masses: portions of the Kenai and Alaska peninsulas and Kodiak Island, with numerous communities reachable only by boat or small plane. In Minnesota, I had been cloistered in the back office. In Alaska, I was at my candidate's side canvassing, fund raising, debating, and engaging the public, especially traditionally under represented groups such as Native Alaskans and family fishing operations.
By creating my own models of voter behavior based on the small town that served as our campaign headquarters, I designed and executed a campaign plan that resulted in the strongest challenge to any incumbent in the state of Alaska in 2004. Combining my technical skills with practical and theoretical knowledge, I turned a sleepy shoe-in for the incumbent into a hotly contested race, drawing attention from across the state. In the most wired state in the Union, Yourkowski had the best web site (which I designed, developed, and maintained). Yourkowski had the most targeted direct mail campaign and weekly letters in the mail box of every new absentee voter. Yourkowski appeared in more newspapers and knocked on more doors than any other candidate. Donations poured into our accounts and to our opponent's coffers --- including some from recently convicted U.S. Senator Ted Stevens' friends at VECO. We set our sights high, and while Yourkowski did not win, I have no regrets about how I ran that race.
My experiences on campaigns in Minnesota and Alaska, my undergraduate experience at a liberal arts college, and my professional experience working for well known names like Apple Computer and Sony/BMG Music have given me so much. I endeavor to share this knowledge in my community. Volunteering for the Luger for District Attorney campaign and Episcopal Group Homes, a supervised living center for adults with developmental disabilities, I have shared my technical skills by building websites. I have repeatedly taught classes on the subject of website development, working with diverse groups such as public access television professionals and volunteer church webmasters. In my work organizing the Twin Cities Drupal User's Group, not only did I teach, but, more importantly, I encouraged others to share their knowledge as well.
Encouraging science education is a priority of mine as well, and I delight in making learning fun. I worked as a classroom assistant in a classroom of 4th and 5th graders. In one particularly enjoyable lesson, I led students in playing The Prisoner's Dilemma. While the finer points of Game Theory would have been difficult to explain, the students learned the fundamentals through playing the game. I have also expressed my commitment to science education through judging at the Murray Junior High School yearly science fair. As a judge, I asked students to explain their hypothesis, independent and dependent variables, and their methods. These are the same questions I ask myself when developing research, and this experience has underscored the importance of science education at all stages of instruction.
As much as I practiced and learned during my time on campaigns and as a professional, I have more questions than when I started. In Alaska, issues of participation, racial politics, and the role of the media were at the center of my concern, but a campaign does not allow for careful, complete consideration and investigation of such issues. I see my graduate education and academic career as an opportunity to understand these issues more thoroughly than I could as a campaigner. My research will be directly applicable to campaigns, citizens groups, and elected officials. These groups introduced me to the questions of Political Science, and it is for them that I am pursuing my research. Specifically, I intend to pursue research that has practical application: better understanding of disenfranchised groups, demographic and geographical changes, and media influences.
I cannot imagine a better fit for my interests of decision making, political participation, and technology than the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Political Science department. Within the Political Science faculty, I have access to experts on political decision making and on pioneering experimental design. The Political Science faculty share my interdisciplinary approach. Faculty members have joint appointments in Psychology, Speech and Communications, Statistics, and other disciplines, including appointments at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. This interdisciplinary environment is an excellent complement to my history of campaign experience and professional technical work. I see myself on a trajectory towards an innovative academic career.