Passed Dissertation Prospectus Defense

On Wednesday, June 11, at 2pm, I defended my dissertation prospectus – this is basically the overall plan for my research and the initial research I’ve done so far. I think it went really well! I passed the defense, and my professors all seemed really interested and excited in the research. My first step will be to very thoroughly define the problem – understand how satellites are used to understand climate change and then see where gaps and overlaps in relevant data collection exist now or may exist in the future. I’m planning to really dig into that when I get back to DC later in the summer.

ISEP Comprehensive Exam - Complete!

Late yesterday afternoon, I turned in my international security comprehensive exam - my last-ever comprehensive exam for my PhD! I put a ton of hours into it, and if I had more time, there are things I know I would have looked into a bit more, but overall, I think it turned out really well!

My essay ended up being about 10,000 words long (17 single-spaced pages), and most of my blog readers probably don't want to know that much about international security policy, but I'll post the question and my executive summary, and if you really want to read the whole thing, I've got a link to the full pdf at the bottom of the page!


In the literature you have reviewed there has been a lengthy discussion of the relative significance of military power and legal regulation in determining the state of international security. Explicitly applying your knowledge of that literature, please assess how these determinants have affected the development of space activity up to this point. Please also discuss how the balance of these and other determinants might change in the future and identify what the principal causes of change might be.

This paper has been broken into three parts. In Part I, I provide an overview of the theories relevant to understanding the relative significance of military power and legal regulation in determining the state of international security. I begin with an overview of realist theory, which assumes a rational, unitary actor in an anarchic system, with material resources and military power of states as the determinant characteristics for the state of international security. I also review institutionalist-legalist theory, which also assumes a rational, unitary actor in an anarchic system, but focuses on the importance of legal regulation in constraining state behavior and determining the state of international security. In Part II, I begin by providing a brief summary of space activity up to this point, focusing on five main aspects: the space race, the development of reconnaissance satellites, the negotiation of the outer space treaties, the increasing crowdedness of space, and the recent attempts at international cooperation on the issue of space security. I then apply realist theory to each of these areas, examining the significance of military power for the development of space activity. Next, institutionalist theory is applied to each area, examining the extent to which legal regulation constrained state behavior and thus affect these developments in space activity. I find that both military power and legal regulation were important determinants in the development of space activity up to this point, but argue that legal regulation provides more insight and explanatory power, particularly in more recent times. In Part III, I provide a brief description of the likely future conditions of the space environment and an overview of one of the chief issues for the future – space security. I then provide realist options for ensuring continued access to and use of space, which rely primarily on threats and coercion, and institutionalist options, which are based on particular forms of international agreements, primarily favoring hard law. I argue that as we look to the future of space activity, military power has a very limited role in determining future developments, primarily due to the inherent need for all space actors to adjust their behavior combined with the physical limitations of the space environment, which make military protection of space assets nearly impossible and offensive or retaliatory space attacks self-defeating. Instead, I argue that international legal regulation will be the most important determinant in the future of sustainable space activity, while other determinants, such as interdependence, may also make contributions.

Read the Full Paper!

Writing My ISEP Comp...

For my international security comprehensive exam, I was emailed an essay question last Wednesday, and I have until this coming Wednesday (1 week) to write an essay in response. This is my very last comp (of 6!), and I'm really excited to finish it.

On Friday, I woke up, printed, reviewed, and highlighted the books and papers from my reading list that I thought were most relevant. I took a bunch of notes based on my highlighting, and organized those notes into the structure of my basic outline. Then it was midnight and I went to bed. (But my mind was still going a million miles an hour, so I didn't fall asleep until 1:30am...)

I woke up at 8am, read over my notes, and started writing. Jeff made me coffee and eggs and toast - brain food.

I basically kept writing from then until about 9:30pm without any real breaks. But then, I had a full first draft written!

I'd like to review what I've written and improve it, and I also want to look at how some other papers on my reading list might fit in, but then that's it!

ISEP Comp and Prospectus Defense - Preparation

I've been away from my blog for about the last two weeks, and the chances are looking good that I'll be away for the next two weeks or so too. I'm planning to complete my last comprehensive exam and defend my prospectus - two really important milestones in my PhD work - all by May 11th. Wish me luck!

Back in DC... and back to school

I've been back in DC for a little over a week now, and I definitely hit the ground running as far as school, work, and wedding planning. I've had a bit of jet lag, but it makes me want to wake up earlier in the morning, which I usually hate to do - so the main side effect is that it's easier to get to work in the morning... not bad.

So I thought I'd do a series of update posts on what's going on in school, work, and wedding planning. (This one is about school.)

For school, I have three main activities: a Dynamic Modeling Course, preparing my Prospectus (the paper that defends the idea for my dissertation), and reading a long list of International Security and Economic Policy (ISEP) books and articles for my (last!) comprehensive exam.

The Dynamic Modeling course is going well, too. I have lectures Thursdays fro 1:30-4pm, and during each class the professor basically walks us through the process of building one or more models - he uses the Stella modeling program on his computer, projected onto the board. That way, we get a sense of the capabilities of the modeling software. Then we have a weekly homework that is basically to build another model on our own that uses the same functionality - it usually takes me an hour or less to do that. It's generally pretty interesting stuff, though I think it's less relevant to my dissertation than I was originally hoping. This week we have a midterm, so instead of going in to class, the professor is going to email us requirements for a specific model to build, and building it will be the test. The other major item for the class is the final project - which is a model you build related to whatever topic you're interested in to help you answer a specific question - something like modeling likely future emissions levels under various conditions - things like that.

Writing the prospectus has been going pretty well - I wrote a short outline/ draft that I sent to my two advisors for feedback. I'm hoping they can let me know if I'm on the right track, and then I can elaborate on what I already have. I think I have a pretty good idea of what I want to do for my dissertation - basically, I'm looking into why there hasn't been more international cooperation in monitoring climate change via satellite, despite numerous international efforts. There are a lot of variables that have been deemed essential, but are not being collected, and there are others that many different countries are all collecting. I'm particularly excited, because I found a database that should allow me to have some analytical aspect to my research - actually running a few regressions to say statistically what matters. I also met with some experts at the Climate Change and Satellite Center at Maryland. They mostly do technical research, but the director of the program is involved in the national and international political efforts to some extent. They gave me a lot of good information, but the main thing I was happy about was the fact that they liked the premise of my thesis, and thought it was a reasonable question to look into.

The last thing is reading all of those books and papers for my final comprehensive exam. This is a tough one, because it's just so time consuming, and there's no way around it. I'm basically up to date on the books I need to read, though I'm a little behind in journals. I'm hoping to write summaries of the things I've read and put them on the blog (like I did with past comps). I figure if I don't write a summary, I don't remember it that well a few months from now, and then what was the point of spending all those hours reading? So hopefully you'll start seeing summaries soon. (Right now I'm reading 'After Hegemony' by Robert Keohane.)

First Day of Class

This semester I’m only taking one real class, and other than that I’m doing independent study to prepare my prospectus defense and study for my international security and economic policy specialization exam.

The one class I’m taking is Dynamic Modeling for Environmental Investment and Policy Making. (Our professor, Matthias Ruth, wrote the text book - I added the picture on the left.) The class is focused on teaching you how to create dynamic models using a program called “Stella.” I’m hoping that the class also provides some background on environmental policy issues, which is one of the main things I’m hoping to get out of it. But the modeling seems pretty fun, too, so I’m ok spending time on that.

The first lecture was canceled because of snow, and we had a substitute for the second lecture who provided somewhat of an overview. Our professor was back for the next lecture, and in class he basically went through an example with the group of building an increasingly complex model of population. At first it only took into consideration births and deaths, then the relationship between population and birthrate, then we added a whole separate model to represent the food supply and its link to the other variables. We eventually added agriculture and manufacturing. It was an interesting demonstration, and definitely provided a better sense of how to use Stella. Looking forward to future lectures!

Reading Applications

I haven't written in over a week, and that's because I've been spending every spare minute working on a side job reviewing freshman applications at UMD. I was helping one of my professors select applicants for a program that she's running.

The whole process was really interesting - I can't write about any specifics, but in general, the applications varied from really incredible (multiple applications had me in tears) to extremely generic (e.g. Such and such sport has taught me everything I need to know about life and dedication and leadership. I got up early for practice... etc.)

One of the first things I did when I started the process was go back to my college application essays and read them. I actually remember staying up all night and writing a bunch of different possible essays.

One was about being really nerdy in Middle School (and loving it), and then realizing in High School that it wasn't necessary to be so pigeon-holed, and that I could broaden my interests and friends. Another one was about traveling to Germany, experiencing a new culture, and having an experience totally different than anything previous in my life. I wrote one about staying up really late at night so that I could go to school, go to work, and still have fun. One essay was about being the president of the National Honor Society and running my very first meeting on September 12, 2011. And another one was about adapting to living away from home for the first time (during a week-long swim camp). I wrote one about dealing with a friend who had attempted suicide. And there were more. In general, Re-reading my essays now, I thought they were pretty good.

But I still did write a bit about sports (in my short answer section): "My most important non-academic activity is swimming... Etc."

I think the essays are really your chance to show how aware you are of what's actually important in the world - what experiences have you had in your first 17 years that have really helped define who you're going to be in the future - in the real world.

Last Day of Classes

Today was my last class of the semester! We actually met in the classroom for about 20 minutes to allow one last person to present, and then we all headed to Franklin's - a bar and restaurant in Hyattsville. It was actually a really cute restaurant with some really nice micro-brews. Great way to end the semester!

Now I just need to finish my two 25-page research papers and my take home exam...

First Day of School

Monday was my first day of school... for the 23rd year in my life. (That's 2 years of pre-school, K-12, 4 years of college, 2 years in a Masters, and this is my second year of the PhD.) Yikes.

My first class on Monday is on Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. It deals generally with all sorts of international agreements, particularly related to security. The class is a small (7 people?) discussion class, and should be interesting.

The second class on Monday is International Economic Policy, which counts as one of my specialization comprehensive exams (if I do well in it). Apparently it has a big international finance component, which I don't know anything about. But it's definitely relevant these days, and hopefully by the end of the semester I'll know a lot about it.

On Tuesday, I had the last of new classes - a class on International Relations and Global Governance. It's in the government department, not the policy school, so there is a lot of background IR (international relations) theory that I'm going to have to catch up on.

Overall, it should definitely be a busy semester - lots of reading and writing - but all of the classes are really new material for me, which I think is really exciting!

School's Out!

Just a couple weeks ago I finished my first year as a PhD student at the University of Maryland! This semester I took three courses: Qualitative Methods, Quantitative Methods, and an independent study on Normative Analysis. Everything went well, and all of the courses were fairly interesting. I really enjoyed the quantitative methods course, where each lecture we would learn a quantitative method (agent based modeling, advanced econometrics, etc.) and hear about on-going research using that method. Qualitative methods I generally enjoyed, though lecture could be more hit or miss, and with three hours of lecture on Friday evening, it was hard to be fully engaged. The Normative Analysis course was great - it was designed to help us discuss and go over normative readings, and was really helpful. In mid-May, I turned in final papers for the Qual and Quant classes, which was the very last thing I needed to do for the semester. So that's it for this school year!

First week of classes

This past week was my first week of school... for the 22nd time in my life. I'm starting my PhD, and I'll probably have about one year of taking classes; then I'll take my qualifying exams, and then I'll spend the next two years writing a paper. Exciting to be at the very beginning of something new!

My classes this semester are some of the core classes for the Public Policy program - things I really haven't studied since high school, if ever. That actually makes it fun, though, because I feel like I'm learning a lot and it's all new and interesting. Here's a quick recap on each class I'm taking this first week:

Quantitative Analysis
This is the advanced statistics course - mostly focused on econometrics. The main focus of the class, other than a few exams, is on a research paper where we carry out an analysis using regression. (Regression is a method to help you understand how much your item of interest - GPD, Salary, etc. depends on other variables, like the amount of education people have, where they live etc.) I'm still deciding what topic I want to write about; I'd like to do something with space, but there isn't much that lends itself well to this type of analysis. The lectures are primarily on how to use this method, I believe.

International Security Policy
This class is actually taught by one of my advisors. It's a completely new topic for me. I've studied space security before, but this class looks historically at the development of security policy beginning with the build up to WWII and the development of nuclear weapons. Just learning the history is interesting for me, because I've never studied or learned in depth about WWII or the Cold War. We also look at the strategic decisions that were made - and try to understand why things happened the way they did. In the first class we discussed a bunch of interesting questions like, "Why was the U.S. the country in which nuclear weapons were first developed?", "Was it inevitable that nuclear weapons would be the first use of nuclear technology, or was it a product of the political atmosphere?", and "Was the United States' use of nuclear weapons in WWII strategically justified? Was it morally justified?" I'm really excited to do the readings for this class and understand more about all of these issues and how they affect security policy today.

Political Institutions and Leadership
This is kind of like a graduate level version of the civics class you had in high school. It looks at the parts of government, what they do, and how they interact. It's much more in depth, of course, and assigns about 300 pages of reading a week. It also takes a somewhat practical view of how a policy person can attempt to get things done in D.C. - how to navigate all the different political institutions. This stuff is all very new to me - I've never looked in detail about how the U.S. system is different than in the U.K., or how the bureaucracy is affected by the courts, etc. Despite the intense amount of reading assigned, I've somehow managed to get ahead - some of the books assigned are really interesting. I think I'll write about them in another post.