Artifact Demonstration and Explanation

My name is Peter DeBaugh, I am an American Politics Concentration student within the

Masters of Political Science program at Appalachian State University. I have spent three

semesters in the program learning how to research, analyze theory and data, gaining

professionalism skills, and gaining a deeper understanding of the American political system, its

components, and its individual actors. There are several artifacts that exemplify the skills and

knowledge that I have gained during my time in the Masters of Political Science program at

Appalachian State University. I hope to showcase my analytical, conceptual, communication,

oral, written, and professional skills that I have achieved while in graduate school.

Beginning with my Urban Sprawl paper from Urban Politics with Dr. Fraser, Ithis paper

demonstrates my ability to synthesize real-world problems in concert with a scholarly book, The

New Urban Crisis, we read for the Urban Politics Class in Fall of 2021. This paper highlights

my ability to analyze urban political phenomena in the real world within the framework of a

book and the solutions it lays out to the problems my paper explores.

My literature review from Public Policy shows the ability to synthesize and compile a

comprehensive literature review of a topic. It shows that I have learned to properly format and

cite a research paper. Synthesizing scholarly articles and referencing those theories to build a

framework for a new theory of online polarization is a skill that I learned very quickly as a

graduate student.

My paper from Political Behavior, Affective Party Polarization on Twitter and Offline,

discusses Twitter polarization of millennials versus older adults. This demonstrates the ability to

formulate and critically think about hypotheses as well as the ability to think critically about the

kinds of conclusions that might be gained from this type of study.

 Another artifact included from Political Behavior Also is my midterm practice

comprehensive exam. We were required to synthesize theories of political behavior, specifically

my midterm dealt with Phillip Converse’s black and white model of behavior as well has Zaller’s

Receive, Accept, Sample (RAS) model. My thorough analyses of these models shows that I not

only understood models that are critically important in the political science literature, but gained

an understanding into how they are applicable in the real world.

To demonstrate my professional skills, I included an email in which Dr. Key shared the

peer evaluations from our American Government Final Project. I took on the leadership role for

that project on strength of gender identity and vote choice. I scheduled all meetings, delegated

roles, and took care of administrative items and produced the bulk of our survey for the project.

As seen in the email, all seven of my classmates appreciated my professional work and

leadership in the project.

Another example of professional skills is my lecture notes and slides from teaching a

class session in Introduction to American Government 1100 during my Fall 2022 semester. I

lectured on voting, how it works, who has the right to vote, and why people do and do not vote.

I showcased my ability to speak in front of a class of sixty-five students and impart information

to the students in a concise and coherent manner. This also exemplifies the goal of

communicating with a diverse group of people and engaging students from different

backgrounds and being able to communicate several important points about voting.

My analytical skills are showcased in my final from Research Methods and Statistics.

We had to use RStudio to analyze and synthesize data while reaching conclusions that were

presented in data sets. I learned in this class how to work RStudio and properly format data sets
while demonstrating the ability to clearly present my conclusions. The RStudio script I used can

be found at the bottom of the exam.

These artifacts show that I have acquired methodological and analytical skills used in the

political science field, learned about and used important content related to the political science

field, that I am able to communicate in diverse contexts to diverse audiences, and have displayed

professional behavior in academic and workplace settings. My time in the Masters of Political

Science Program here at Appalachian State has been a time of great development for me both

personally and academically and I am grateful to all the faculty and staff that have played such a

big part of that development.