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Mercy Corps Personal Statement

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As a Master’s student in Justice, Law & Criminology completing my degree in May 2016, I would be an excellent fit for the Youth and Conflict Research and Learning Internship with Mercy Corps. I was alerted to the internships with your organization by a professor and have spoken with Ms. Beza Tesfaye in the past regarding such opportunities. I believe that my demonstrated dedication to understanding violence, my technical research skills, and my varied work experience equip me to serve Mercy Corps’s mission to alleviate suffering, poverty and oppression by helping people build secure, productive and just communities. In my coursework, I have studied a variety issues related to violence, crime, law, and justice. I am especially interested …show more content…

After completing the research design and analysis requirements for my degree, I sought out additional quantitative methodology courses and research workshops available at the university. Those courses have included such topics as multivariate regression, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity designs, and other quasi-experimental methods. I have also developed skills in cleaning, organizing, and managing large and complex datasets through coursework and independent research. I have worked with data from the Survey of War Affected Youth, the Afrobarometer and Arabarometer, and the World Values Survey, among other sources. Not only have I built a set of technical skills, but I have also developed an understanding of causality that equips me to choose appropriate methods for my research questions, accurately interpret results, and meaningfully communicate findings. In my current fellowship with the Peace and Violence Research lab, I am working under the guidance of a faculty advisor, Dr. Thomas Zeitzoff, and Dr. Cyrus Samii of New York University to design a web-based survey experiment on the emotional and political effects of images disseminated by extremist

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