Point of Pride Anniversary

Today is the anniversary of my last McGill PhD student's dissertation defence.  On that day, I blogged about all of my McG PhD students who went on to tenure track positions--all but one.  Nearly all are now tenured.  Because there is so much bad news these days, I thought I would update that post, as they have all gone on to doing quite well for themselves.  I find it strange to be proud of their accomplishments because I know that I had little to do with it--they are a bunch of smart, motivated, creative, diligent, fun people.  I am just glad I have been along for the ride.  To be clear, I am proud of my pre- and post-McG students, so I will include them below as well. 

• Sam Stanton, my only TTU PhD student, was my first former student to chair his department at Grove City College.
• Brent Sasley is tenured at U of Texas at Arlington.  He has published two books on Middle East politics and a number of articles on a variety of topics including ... blogging. 
• Jonathan Paquin is tenured at Université Laval, has published books on Foreign Policy Analysis, the Decline of US Hegemony, and on US-Canadian relations plus many articles on a range of topics.
• Suranjan Weeraratne is tenured at Southern Illinois U Edwardsville. He faced a health crisis that he overcame with much tenacity.  SIU-E was most supportive.  He has manged to publish a number of articles ranging from Islamist extremism in Nigeria and ethnic migrants in Southeast Asia.
• Amy Cox wrote her dissertation on why some separatists use violence and others do not.  She is now a realtor. 
• Ora Szekely is tenured at Clark University. She's published books on Militant Group Survival in the Mideast and Insurgent Women with Jessica Trisko and Alexis Henshaw.  She suckered me into contributing to an amazing book on doing Fieldwork in Political Science, and we are working together on an article (and book project?) that examines bureaucratic politics from a different perspective. 
• Jessica Trisko is at American University and has recently been a Fellow at American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC.  She has published two books, one on the subversive impact of foreign aid and the other being the aforementioned Insurgent Women.
• Aisha Ahmad is up for tenure this year at the University of Toronto and it is a slam dunk.  Her book Jihad & Co.: Black Markets and Islamist Power has done quite well including spinning off an award-winning International Security article.
• Sarah-Myriam Martin-Brûlé has not only published a book on Evaluating Peacekeeping Missions, but has also served as an adviser to the United Nations.
• Maya Dafinova is my first Carleton PhD student to have survived me and the process.  She compared the whole of government efforts in Afghanistan and is now working at a non-profit in Ireland. 
  

Yes, one reason I moved to NPSIA was to reduce the number of PhD students I supervised.  Not because I had bad experiences before but because I feared that the academic job market would mean that the run of nearly full employment would end.  This strategy mostly worked as I only had one PhD student at Carleton for a while.  She finished, but now I have four PhD students in different stages of the process on a range of issues:

• Russian intervention policy
• Canadian defence decisions
• understanding the failures of the Afghanistan effort
• the effects of external election interference.  

What they share in common is again a great imagination and hardly any Saideman disciples among them.  They are more likely to be headed to the policy world because that is the nature of the NPSIA program.

Overall, I have been the primary supervisor of more than three dozen students and have been on the committees of another two dozen or so.  I have learned so much from these folks over the years, including how to whine about literature reviews over and over again.  Because I have students who do stuff that is mostly different from what I do, I learn much more about the world, and I see it from a variety of perspectives.  Given that I got into this business because I am excessively curious, I am most grateful to these folks for opening my eyes to all kinds of stuff.