“I am a restless person with a limited attention span, and I need new challenges from time to time,” said Professor Jan Van den Bulck, the first Director of the QMSS program. One need only review his 36 page CV to reveal the breadth of experience that he has acquired in pursuit of new stimuli. Before joining the Communication and Media Department at the University of Michigan, Professor Van den Bulck spent 25 years as a full professor for the Department of Communications at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, writing innumerable journal articles in multiple languages, contributing book chapters on a variety of subjects, and receiving myriad of awards and honors recognizing his wide ranging abilities. In addition to his Ph.D. in social sciences from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, he also earned a D.Sc. in Epidemiology from Erasmus University Rotterdam. Other career highlights include the Golden Mouse award for best ICT Innovation Project, being a TV critic, a radio play script writer, an emergency medical technician, a speaker at multiple disaster management conferences, a member of the Belgian Association for Sleep Research and Sleep Medicine, being an editor for Wiley-Blackwell’s International Encyclopedia of Media Psychology, delivery of a TedX, and an invited speaker to the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit.
Of his decision to leave Leuven, he said, “People were starting to tell me that I had it all together and that I was getting to a stage where I could just continue on autopilot until retirement. To someone like me, that is the same as inviting me to turn everything upside down and make things complicated again.” In his quest to mix it up, he left not only the school, but the country and the continent, bringing his wife and children to Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan. Drawn to the university for its renowned media effects researchers, he also felt a special calling. “My advisor's advisor’s advisor was Nils Gösta Carlsson, a Swedish philosopher who felt philosophy had to be practical. I did some digging and discovered that he had been deputy director at CPS at ISR. I found a copy of his Ph.D in the Michigan library, and it listed all the interests in measuring social and human phenomena that I still have today.”
Professor Van den Bulck served on the committee that recommended the creation of QMSS and was excited to be selected as its first director, a three-year position. “I like to think about the acronym QMSS as also meaning our “QMSS quadrant”: the idea that a good social scientist needs to ask the right Questions, find the right Methods to study them, develop the right Study, and come as close as possible to a Solution. Teaching students to think of the entire quadrant offers something that is sometimes missing compared to what students get exposed to in individual classes. Knowing what a regression is, is tough enough, but knowing whether you need a T-test or a factor analysis to answer your question is perhaps the hardest part of becoming an independent researcher. We have to make sure our students leave here with a good basis of understanding and with the right tools to keep learning and innovating their own knowledge base.” When asked to describe what a successful QMSS program looks like, he added, “Because we are not part of an existing department or tradition, for me the biggest success would be an organically grown esprit the corps, or sense of community among our students. We want to teach undergraduates to think and work and collaborate like empirical social scientists - that is a certain mindset we hope to install.”
Over the last several months, he has been steadily working with a steering committee to adjust the curriculum to reflect the surprisingly vast student interest that he has seen. Originally intended for social science majors only, daily inquiries arrive from students across a multitude of fields who are deeply interested in the minor. In support of the growing popularity, QMSS is interviewing candidates who will teach their core classes. The desire is to ensure that classes can be offered more frequently, providing program access to more students. Though Professor Van den Bulck may teach QMSS courses in the future, there are no plans for him to do so now. His time is thoroughly committed to the needs of the fledgeling program, and to teaching popular courses for the Communications and Media Department.
His most popular class is a Communications and Media capstone, Celebrity Effects, a Social Science Approach. “The topic is something that students can relate to. Celebrities are a large part of the "symbolic environment" of many young people. You'd be surprised how many even follow famous pets on Instagram! But the class takes celebrities and their impact on society seriously and helps them think about that critically and empirically. Many of the students have ambitions to work in applied communication fields and feel that this is directly relevant. I also attract a fair number of our athletes, who have had to deal with being in the spotlight themselves.”
Listening to the professor, it is clear that he is deeply invested in the continuing success of his students. “I was helping a bright student once who was writing an honors thesis, and when they started analyzing their data, nothing they did made any sense. I kept trying to tell them what was wrong, but it was clear we were not connecting. They eventually said something that sounded odd and then I realized that they had misunderstood what an “independent variable” is. They thought it had to be a variable that had no relationship whatsoever with what they were studying. That taught me a lot about mentoring and listening, and it is also a perfect example of what QMSS wants to achieve. Too often people drop out of quantitative research because they hit a snag and the experts they work with are so specialized that they no longer know how to connect. I want students to feel comfortable enough to keep coming back with their problem until they “get” it. It is more important to understand those basics than to leave the university with a piece of parchment, but also a gaping hole in the toolbox.”
For more information about Professor Van den Bulck, find his CV and more here.
