Throughout the summer, I participated in various different projects that were all in different stages for professor Michael Horowitz. During the summer, I was exposed to a wide range of research opportunities, and learned a little about everything. Much of my summer was spent updating and maintaining internal databases with sensitive information, such as for our Military Alliances Project and for our Precision Guided Munitions (PGM) Project. For Military Alliances, I worked alongside another PhD student while researching hundreds of obscure terrorist groups from the 1960s to present. To update this database, I had to find when the groups were active, and other attribute information such as whether they had a religious, environmental, or other political objective. Although many times it felt as if it was almost impossible to find information, access to other, more expansive databases helped round out what I was missing. For the PGM Project, I had to maintain and clean existing databases logging all the different types of missiles held by countries around the world, and all their statistics. This included their range, distance, terminal guidance system, and other criteria. Another project I worked on, The Telegraph Project, required us to research the first time countries were connected via telegraph, directly and indirectly. Additionally, I had to research multiple wars such as the Mexican-American War and the Paraguayan War, which occurred as telegraph lines were being put in, to look for how differences in the speed of communication affected battles or the war effort.
Throughout the summer, I participated in various different projects that were all in different stages for professor Michael Horowitz. During the summer, I was exposed to a wide range of research opportunities, and learned a little about everything. Much of my summer was spent updating and maintaining internal databases with sensitive information, such as for our Military Alliances Project and for our Precision Guided Munitions (PGM) Project. For Military Alliances, I worked alongside another PhD student while researching hundreds of obscure terrorist groups from the 1960s to present. To update this database, I had to find when the groups were active, and other attribute information such as whether they had a religious, environmental, or other political objective. Although many times it felt as if it was almost impossible to find information, access to other, more expansive databases helped round out what I was missing. For the PGM Project, I had to maintain and clean existing databases logging all the different types of missiles held by countries around the world, and all their statistics. This included their range, distance, terminal guidance system, and other criteria. Another project I worked on, The Telegraph Project, required us to research the first time countries were connected via telegraph, directly and indirectly. Additionally, I had to research multiple wars such as the Mexican-American War and the Paraguayan War, which occurred as telegraph lines were being put in, to look for how differences in the speed of communication affected battles or the war effort.