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My
interest in this project began when I took ECON 415 – Law and Economics in the summer
of 2014. Prof. Nick Bormann, a PhD candidate in Economics and the class’
instructor, spoke to his research interests throughout the class and I found
that my interests aligned well with his. I knew I wanted to participate in URSP
and was looking for a mentor so I approached him about the opportunity. It
turned out that he had a research topic that he has been meaning to get to, but
has not had the time or help to do so; my timing was perfect. There are so many
professors out there who need help with research or know someone who does that
you have a pretty good chance of getting into research as an undergraduate if
you just ask!
The
project I am working on will hopefully provide some important insight into why
high involuntary employment and high fees exist in the legal industry. In order
for this to happen, I have to collect data from multiple sources and conduct
statistical analysis to make sense of the data. Our main quantitative methods
are regressions; this is done to find correlations. Because of the nature of
this research, I work from my desktop at home where I have two large screens
for doing my data collection and analysis.
On a
weekly basis, I am communicating with organizations, whether it be county
courthouses or a bar association, to figure out what data they collect and can
easily give to me. I also collect data from open sources where the information
I want is not aggregated. For example, this week I have been working on
developing a program (and also discovering how to do this!) in Python to parse
HTML documents for information regarding attorney wages and employment in
Florida by metropolitan area and year. I am doing this because it would be very
time consuming to go to each webpage and table, pick out the information I
want, and manually type it into an excel spreadsheet; why do that when I can
program something to do that for me!
This work
has immensely factored into my long-term professional development by providing
me the ability to work with data and draw meaningful insights out of messy
data. I am no longer given a clean dataset in class where I run one test and
that is all; I have to now decide what data I want and whether I can process it
in a way that would be beneficial to this research project. This has been an
amazing experience so far and I actively encourage anyone interested in URSP to
apply!
