11. The Effects of Friend-to-Friend Texting on Voter Turnout and Overcoming Project Setbacks with Aaron Schein

This episode features Aaron Schein, a computer scientist and postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. We discuss his WWW 2021 paper "Assessing the Effects of Friend-to-Friend Texting on Turnout in the 2018 US Midterm Elections", co-authored with Keyon Vafa, Dhanya Sridhar, Victor Veitch, Jeffery Quinn, James Moffet, David Blei, and Donald Green.

Aaron shares with us how he collaborated with industry partners, overcame the discovery of a confounder that challenged the experiment’s original design, and responded to public feedback. He also mapped his interdisciplinary journey through linguistics, political science, and computer science, and shared his twist on imposter syndrome.