Spotlighted Student: Ryan Baxter-King '16

Weather can make or break a college visit. When Ryan Baxter-King ’16 visited Philadelphia area colleges over the course of two days, he had a miserable rainy day and a beautiful sunny day. The day he visited Haverford College was the sunny beautiful day.  He liked the campus feel and the people he met. The small student body and Honor Code clinched his decision to apply to the school early decision. It was also comfortably close to his home town of Lexington, MA where he attended a small high school.

Ryan is partial to history and American politics. After taking a government class his senior year of high school, he entered college planning on majoring in Political Science but taking Introductions to Economics with Calculus his freshman year at Haverford made him want to learn more. As his curriculum progressed, Ryan realized he had amassed enough courses to double major in economics and political science while minoring in statistics.

Classes that have left a particularly lasting impression on Ryan include Political Economy, an Economics junior research seminar, and Congress, a Political Science course. In fact, Political Economy with economics Professor Giri Parameswaran was the turning point when Ryan decided a major in economics was a good fit.

He is writing a joint thesis with the Political Science department examining representation and how voters form preferences for political candidates. Specifically, he is interested in the relationship between substantive representation (i.e. being represented in a particular way) and descriptive representation (i.e. being represented by a member of their social group). Reviewing the literature on voter preferences has been a new and exciting experience because it is a very (!) wide literature that draws from many different disciplines including Political Science, Economics, Sociology, and Psychology. Ultimately, he hopes to test the hypotheses he is developing with a survey experiment, potentially hosted on Amazon's Mechanical Turk website.

Over the past three summers, Ryan has tried a number of different experiences while trying to decide what he wants to do after college. The summer after his freshman year he worked as a research assistant for Haverford’s political science Professor Zachary Oberfield researching privatization and charter schools. The following summer he interned in Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Boston office, working in constituent services. This past summer Ryan lived in Washington, DC interning for Civis Analytics where he analyzed survey data in the Applied Data Science Department. He also performed literature reviews and scrutinized survey research methods.

Ryan has involved himself in several organizations on campus, serving on Customs Teams as an Honor Code Orienteer (HCO) and a Peer Awareness Facilitator (PAF). He also served on Honor Council for two semesters, one as a class representative and one as a co-chair, and was a co-founder of Nerd House in his sophomore year. In the past, he has also played cello in Haverford’s orchestra and currently plays in one of Professor Heidi Jacob’s chamber music groups.

After graduation, Ryan hopes to work in a think tank, research organization, or political data organization. Overall, he is interested in a career that will let him work on issues that are important to him, learn new skills and statistical methods, and work on different types of projects. He may go to graduate school after a few years of being in the work force.