How to Think and What to Think About to Make the World a Better Place

It’s peak summer, but Aman Choudhri, a soon-to-be senior majoring in mathematics and statistics at Columbia College, isn’t taking time off. Instead, he’s pursuing a public policy internship and working with Professor Andrew Gelman on a new project that aims to better understand the relationship between people’s social networks, their information environment, and their political preferences.

Columbia News caught up with Choudhri to discuss how, in his time at Columbia, he’s discovered an interest in politics, a passion for bhangra dance, and some favorite New York City spots for nonalcoholic drinks and jazz.

You’re working on a new data project with the public opinion company YouGov. What are you looking into?

The project is a partnership between my mentor, Prof. Andrew Gelman, and YouGov. Our primary aim is to explore the extent to which people’s social ties shape their policy preferences and reactions to major political events. We based this research direction on a few studies that have suggested this kind of influence from specific parts of people's social environments. For example, one interesting paper demonstrated that the group of white Americans most likely to vote for President Trump in 2016 were people who were “nationally poor” but “locally rich.” In other words, their income was below the national median but above their ZIP code’s median. 

By partnering with YouGov and gaining access to a relatively large pool of about 6,000 respondents (similar studies tend to have a sample size of around 500), we’re hoping to present a more complete picture of the relationship between similar local or social sources of information and people’s political preferences.

In terms of my involvement on the project, I got started by taking Professor Gelman’s class on applied statistics this past semester. I ambushed him after class one time and asked for some recommendations for high-quality quantitative sociology papers (that day’s class was all about poor research practices that were unfortunately commonplace). He mentioned a dataset he remembered about people’s social networks and their policy preferences, and recommended that I analyze it for my class final project. That dataset turned out not to exist! A couple of chats at office hours later, I asked him to supervise a summer research project with me to collect that data and make it a reality.

What drew you to this kind of work, and to Professor Gelman’s class? Are you a politics junkie?

I like to think of myself as an aspiring politics junkie (policy wonk?), but my interest in the YouGov project actually comes from another angle: sociology. I took a class on classical social theory this past fall, in which I had the opportunity to read theories from sociologists like Max Weber and Erving Goffman. Goffman’s ideas of the “interaction order,” in particular, captured my imagination. His theory centers on the relationship between macro-level social structures like race or class and micro-level interpersonal interactions. This theme of the linkages between individual-level concerns like social networks and large-scale social phenomena like political outcomes is at the heart of my interest in the YouGov project. 

Working with Professor Gelman is a dream come true for anyone interested in applied statistics. I’d been watching his talks for years before this project. I was especially excited by his focus on studying statistics as it’s used in practice, in fields like psychology and economics—both of which have undergone significant “replication crises” in recent years, where researchers have discovered that whole avenues of research have been based on questionable-at-best findings fueled by poor statistical practice. It’s the perfect area for someone interested in pragmatic questions on how statistics might be used to improve society.

You have an internship this summer with the Public Policy Lab. When did you first get interested in public policy?

Within the past year, actually! I spent a lot of time in my first two years of college thinking about technical topics like Bayesian neural networks and deep generative models. My interests shifted while taking Contemporary Civilization, Columbia College’s mandatory political philosophy sequence. In it, I got my first exposure to thinkers like Foucault, DuBois, and Arendt. With little understanding of what I had just read but knowing I loved it, I said to myself, I want to be like them. A "person who thinks things." A lot of my journey through college so far has been trying to figure out what this means: how to think, and what to think about. Hopefully, all aimed at making the world a better place. Lately, this philosophical bent has led me to train my statistical background on questions in public policy, where I most feel there’s room for thinkers who want to do good. I’ve recently been spending a lot of time learning about statistical methods to analyze the effectiveness of various programs, whether governmental or run by nonprofits.

Can you tell me a bit about Columbia Bhangra? How did you get involved, what's the farthest-flung place you have gone with the group, and when did you decide to throw your hat in to be the club's captain?

Columbia Bhangra is a competitive dance team dedicated to bhangra, an energetic folk dance from the Panjab region in South Asia. I tried out on a whim after seeing the team perform during freshman orientation, somehow made it past callbacks, and I’ve loved it ever since. I decided to run for captain at the end of sophomore year, aiming to help make our choreography more competitive and grounded in bhangra’s rich history. The team put in an incredible effort this past year, culminating in competition performances in both Madison, Wisconsin, and Santa Barbara, California!

What's your favorite place to do work on campus?

It’s hard to beat sitting at Joe's Coffee in NoCo [editor’s note: the Northwest Corner Building] on a sunny day.

What's your favorite place in New York to do anything other than work?

For a while, it was Fat Tiger, a little nonalcoholic speakeasy hidden behind a bookshelf in an East Village coffee shop. Very New York. I think it’s recently rebranded as Hidden Tiger, but I haven’t been since it has. My other choice is the great Smalls Jazz Club.