Cecily Schar is a Carleton College Class of 2027 student studying Political Science and International Relations with a strong quantitative interest in statistics. Her research interests sit at the intersection of public policy, political institutions, and quantitative analysis, especially how administrative rules and legal systems shape access to public services and how data can be used to evaluate policy outcomes.

Previous research experience: I currently work as a research assistant at Carleton. A realistic version of my work would involve literature review, cleaning state- or county-level policy data, building reproducible datasets, and using statistical models to compare outcomes across jurisdictions. My previous work as a humanities fellow, student writer, and litigation assistant also gave me experience reading closely, organizing evidence, and translating complicated material into clear arguments.

How I got started: I got interested in research by combining political science coursework with statistics and then talking with a professor whose work used empirical data. I started by asking if there were discrete tasks I could help with, such as coding sources or cleaning data, and built from there.

Open to being contacted: Maybe, ask me first

Preferred contact: LinkedIn

Advice/notes: political science research; combining statistics with the social sciences; finding faculty research positions; policy datasets; literature reviews; legal and policy research; balancing research with writing-intensive work

Links

Location

Tampa

Tampa, FL, USA