QMSS is happy to welcome Harrison Clark to the program as one of the new GSIs for QMSS 201. Harrison is currently a student at the Taubman School of Architecture and Urban Planning, where he is working toward a Master’s of Regional and Urban Planning and Certificate in Urban Informatics. Before coming here, he studied at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, where he earned degrees in Political Science and French.
As an undergrad, Harrison was first exposed to quantitative methods through his study of political science. One of his major projects required turning qualitative data (political candidate’s online rhetoric) into data that could be analyzed quantitatively. He has also leveraged his experience with geographic information systems (GIS) and R to assess demographic differences and their relationships to transportation usage.
Harrison also has experience with the applied social sciences through his employment history. During the early parts of the COVID-19 pandemic, he worked as a contact tracer in Chicago. This job involved conducting structured interviews, using and improving a database of contacts, and generalizing the sociological and public health implications of his findings to public health professionals. Harrison is currently using his social science skills in his internship at the Build America Bureau, where he is overseeing the creation of a national geographic database of federal transportation loans.
When asked why he came to the University of Michigan, Harrison explained that he was drawn by the specialized transportation concentration within the master’s program. To him, this program offers a way to “bridge the policy and implementation gap” and to implement data as a tool to make informed decisions in transportation planning. While here, Harrison has taken classes in fields as diverse as economics, science and technology studies, and even aerospace management.
As an undergrad, Harrison wished he had access to specific program in quantitative methods, and he is now glad to help teach students the lessons he learned across multiple departments. He believes the QMSS Program offers a “robust education,” providing a skillset in a unified location so that students can learn how to succeed with these skills more easily. Skills he rated as most important were data scraping with R, handling big data, and creating visualizations for diverse audiences.
Harrison’s main research interests are how people interact with the built environment, how people move from place to place, and how policy can/should help people make socially optimal decisions. He also believes that quantitative methods can help students apply their classroom knowledge toward real, workable solutions for difficult problems in the social sciences.
