About Me

As previously stated I am a member of ILCMA, ICMA, and ASPA each with their own code of ethics and standards of professional excellence. I have a personal responsibility to: Advance the public interest; advance professional excellence; uphold the Constitution and the law; promote democratic participation and communication; strengthen social equity and pursue equitable service provision; fully inform, advise, and enact; demonstrate personal integrity and disinterest; promote ethical organizations, institutions, and norms. This statement represents my responsibility to any community I enter service to. It emphasizes by duty to reflect the plurality inherent to any representative-democratic body and population. It establishes the aspirational goal of any policy I enact in the direction of the legislative body. It also guides my responsibilities as a servant of the public as a citizen of a representative democracy. Particularly important to me as a new student of Public Administration is the commitment to the pursuit of professional excellence via my education, practice, and proliferation of novel policy formulations and implementations.

Beyond this I believe there are three systemic issues within governance in the U.S. Those being: a lack of communication, a lack of accessibility, and a lack of shared service provision.

Communication from municipalities is almost entirely surrendered to politicians with communication from professional staff being limited to the board room. This is an issue as it definitionally limits engagement from the public in the decision-making process. I believe that professionals must seek to communicate to the mass public about emerging public issues, potential policy solutions, and what implementation may look like. This allows for earnest buy-in from the public which any public health official or international aid worker would be able to explain the importance of.

Further mass communication aids in quelling concerns about political bias and the like. The current professed norm is that professionals be political actors but only so far as they advise politicians and create policy recommendation which requires leadership which is necessarily normative and thus political. However, it is still the norm for professionals to project a false image of neutrality. This clearly does not work as people will still identify many actions they dislike simply as the result of political bias and givens credence to the idea that professionals are hiding their political bias since that is literally what is occurring. I believe that professionals should be seen by the public to be eschewing their political interest, not trying to cover it up from the public.

Accessibility is a major issue yet to be addressed by governments. Variation in website design, limited support for keyboard navigation, autoplaying of audio-visual media, and an intense reliance on improperly created PDFs for actual information, and many other UI/UX decisions lead to limited accessibility. Further many municipalities will not release public documents and while FOIA helps on an individual level, it requires that individual have the time and knowledge to send in a request. Many municipalities do not have archives where they post successful FOIA requests, let alone the documents themselves. A lesson government (and private business for that matter) has failed to learn from the ADA, is that accessibility helps everyone.

Accessible websites are not sufficient either as it assumes an engaged public. Even fifty years ago or a century ago the idea of everyone being civically engaged at the local level was a myth. However, in the nationalized information (and thus news) environment, it is harder than ever for individuals to be engaged at the local level. It must be seen as a primary responsibility for local government to find ways to break into people's information ecosystem and create engaged residents.

Considering how networked and integrated public administration is, the lack of shared service provision is shocking. The primary example for me is the lack of shared internet services. The fact the municipalities rely on a handful of private companies for web-hosting, document creation, and permitting is shocking. If that is the case, why have a failed to provide these services more democratically and cheaper via intergovernmental cooperation and collaboration. In particular this would aid in accessibility since the most important property of any accessibility standard is not that it is perfectly accessible, but instead that it is standard. Since municipalities use different software and hosting services, there is unnecessary variation in information sharing that limits accessibility and public engagement.

I am generally interested in the Social Science methods. In my undergraduate I minored in Political Science where I focused on International Relations. My panel presentation and associated paper proposed a network based measure of dyadic allyship between nation-states.

I have an intermediate understanding of R with experience in descriptive statistics, interactive plots and maps, Shiny applications, (linear, logistic, and multilevel) regression analysis and hypothesis testing, introductory descriptive network analysis, supervised and unsupervised text as data analysis, and more.

Within Public Administration my primary research interests focus on the policy proliferation process and the quality of electoral representation at the local level. In particular I am looking into expanding upon the standard understanding of urban to suburban to rural policy proliferation as well as if and how policies for extreme contexts proliferate to other municipalities in a similar context regardless of legal, cultural, and structural differences. The main context I examine elector quality of representation is in college towns since students represent an incredibly weak voting bloc with significant costs and benefits for municipalities while generally being low income renters (they effectively wedge traditional opinions by land owners and local government regarding service provision).

Currently I am: Applying my background in web service self-hosting to a website redesign for the Village of Lake Villa; filling the role of a permit coordinator; conducting comparative salary and benefits analysis; exploring business development program opportunities and more. For the website redesign I will be emphasizing accessibility and transparency with the aims of developing tools and processes to maintain those values.

In the past I wrote articles for NIU's student news paper the Northern Star as a data journalist focused on local government. I also have survey research and environmental sustainability experience through my work on the NIU B.A.R.K.S. Survey. My full C.V. is available here.

Currently I am seeking the highest level of engagement and excellence in the NIU MPA program. I hope to use this experience within the program and at my internship to quickly gain the relevant skills to move from Management Analyst up through local government potentially to an Administrator position. I believe that my current skill set and current environment are ideal for achieving this while adhering to my professional ethics and public service values.