Education
I’m a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Gothenburg.
I hold an M.A. in Political Science from the University of Cologne. I specialized in comparative political institutions, qualitative and quantitative methods. I have a keen interest in the use of (computational) social science methods in public policy.
Before that, I completed my bachelor degree in International Relations at Rhine-Waal University, Kleve Germany in 2018. The focus of my B.A. was on International Politics, International Law, and International Economics.
I blog because it allows me to practise and improve my writing skills. I must confess that writing well is hard. So, I’m always full of admiration for scholarly works that are extremely well-written. I’ve also come to learn to read not only like a reader, but also like a writer.
In the process of learning to become an academic writer, I have learnt to appreciate readers and audiences pointing out weaknesses in my writings and presentations. In fact, there are moments when these weakenesses are those I haven’t even thought of, or those I should have thought of. These experiences have continually improved the quality of my writing.
I began blogging by putting my notes, assignments and materials on social science methods together as blog posts. I synthesize the materials in a way that helps me understand them better. But note that I am not infallible. For this reason, I come back every now and then to revise my posts in light of what I learn in my doctoral training. But, needless to say, the institution that I am affiliated with bears no responsibility for what I write here.
Skills
Research skills
● Basic and Applied Research
● Applied Statistics and Econometrics
● Impact Evaluation and Public Policy
● Qualitative Research
Language skills
- English (C2)
- German (B2)
- Swedish (A2)
- Yoruba (Native)
Computational Skills
● Statistical Software (R), Tableau
● Data Wrangling and Data Exploration
● (Basic) Text Mining
Work Experience
Research Assistant at the University of Cologne
(November 2019 – August 2021)
Assisting Professor Ingo Rohlfing in research on social science methods at the Cologne Center for Comparative Politics.
● Supported the team in European Research Council (ERC) Project: Enhanced Qualitative and Multimethod Research (EQMMR)
● Collected, compiled and coded qualitative data
● Uploaded qualitative data to Sciebo (cloud storage for research)
● Cleaned and prepared survey data for analysis on R
● Conducted pre-analysis of research project on R
Research Assistant at the University of Cologne
(June 2019 – April 2020)
Support research and teaching at the Chair for Comparative Politics (Prof. Dr. André Kaiser) at the Cologne Center for Comparative Politics.
● Data collection and data entry for projects funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
● Generated insights from a dataset of a Ph.D project on the European Commision via exploratory data analysis (EDA) on R and Microsoft Excel.
● Filtered and merged large cross-sectional time-series dataset on R and checked the datatset for error.
● Co-supervised undergraduate and master’s exam.
● Proof-read a few chapters of a Ph.D. dissertation.
Intern at Nigeria Embassy Berlin
(January 2017 – March 2017)
Taiwo A. Ahmed 