Intellectual Professional Biography/Personal Statement – Final Revised Version
Adam Ramadan – CCTP 505 Section 4
Hello Everyone!
My interests lie primarily in the broad field of political science, and at CCT I hope
to leverage my background in political science by analyzing the intersection of
technology and political communications. With an academic background that
covers international law, fragile government infrastructures and diplomacy, I
believe CCT will best provide me with the ability to approach political science
(including some of the subsections recently mentioned here) through a lens that
looks not just at the policy (or the method in which a political system arrives at
said policy), but also the effectiveness of the policy based on the method of
communication. From a marketing communications perspective we often hear
about the dilemma of “if a tree falls in a forest but no one is there to hear or see it
fall, did it really fall?” I hope to get past the question of whether the tree fell or
not and to the question of how many people saw/heard the tree fall because it
was live-tweeted, broadcast live on Youtube, or because facebook asked anyone
within 20 miles of the tree to report back and let others know they’re ok, and
which of those technological and communicative tools was the most (and least)
effective in communicating out the event at hand.
I am a native New Yorker who arrived in Washington DC in the Fall of 2010 to
begin my undergraduate career in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign
Service. Through an International Politics major with a concentration in Foreign
Policy and processes, I started to approach this far-reaching concept of “politics”
in every way imaginable. From the intimate dynamic between two people who
share a 150 sq. ft space together as roommates to different governmental political
systems from my time studying abroad in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for 5 months,
different elements of politics appear everywhere. What my undergraduate career
didn’t dig into too deeply, though, was the different methods of communication
each of those political situations present their policies and positions with, and
how new and rapidly evolving technology impacts that means of communication
– this is what I hope to walk away from CCT with.