Interview with Haoyu ZHAI, PhD candidate in Political Science

Hi! I am Haoyu, a second-year PhD candidate at the European University Institute. I’m also a pre-doc at the Nuffield Centre for Experimental Social Sciences, Oxford. My field is political science, and my main research areas are comparative authoritarianism and political methodology. 

Two (very vanilla...) reasons: interest and need! I am always interested in numerical and computational methods, especially their applications in empirical political research, and one of my main research areas happens to be the same stuff. Political scientists and political methodologists have always looked beyond our own discipline, in search of good ideas and good methods from sister disciplines (economics, sociology, etc) to solve our own problems and advance our own field. I hope to do the same, and the CIVICA initiative has been great in help with this. In particular, since I have had some prior training with economists at my institute earlier this year, the Sciences Po-led online courses seemed a natural next step for me.

It’s been great! I’m not going to hold back from my praises for our lecturer — Florian (Prof Oswald) — for his excellent teaching and support throughout the course. He’s been super helpful, patient, and responsive, and the course contents are, despite (obviously) economics centred, quite useful and inspiring for other social science disciplines (such as my own) too. I felt welcome even as a non-economist. The cohort is also very friendly and get along well with each other, even just online : )

Absolutely! This is a great opportunity to pool our resources together, expand our knowledge reserves, make new friends, and access new ideas and new tools. It’s also probably the one positive thing that emerged out of the whole COVID-19 misfortune: harnessing the power of the modern ICT and building knowledge networks across institutions and disciplines. Less geographical barrier, more intellectual energy! Why not??