18
STUDENT SPOTLIGHT
Presidential prose Graduate student Ben Noble’s research on the American presidency has launched him into the political science spotlight and landed him a job at one of the top universities in his field.
by
JENNY BIRD
The summer before he started graduate school at WashU, Ben Noble wrote himself a letter. Putting his thoughts down helped him consider the challenges of transitioning from the professional world back into academia. As he got the hang of being a graduate student in the political science department, a challenging top-15 program, he began to write articles about what he’d learned, offering advice on everything from choosing an advisor to preparing an academic talk. His planning paid off. Noble’s graduate research on the American presidency went on to win several awards, including the Arts & Sciences Dean’s Award for Graduate Research Excellence and an American Political Science Association award for the best graduate student paper in his subfield. As he prepared to defend his dissertation, he sat down with the Ampersand to reflect on his work and his time at WashU.
Have you always been interested in political science? I majored in history during my undergrad at WashU, but I’ve always been interested in politics. I ultimately decided to pursue political science and the kinds of questions we can answer with data science. As social scientists, we think about generalizable theories and test them with empirical data. I was drawn to using those methods to answer bigger-picture questions about American institutions, especially the presidency.
You’ve won awards for your research on the presidency. Tell us about that work. I’m interested in how American presidents have communicated with the public and Congress. I approach that not by thinking about any individual president so much as thinking about the presidency as an institution. I study the transcribed text of spoken content, looking for patterns.
