Thanks to Our Students

As one can easily imagine, the work that went into constructing the website associated with this project has been enormous. While the professors listed on the front page of our website wrote the grant proposal, did the bulk of the interviews, and have been involved in the project from beginning to end, it is no exaggeration to say that the project would never have come near completion without the work of dozens of student assistants. Some students worked just for a semester; others have been with us literally for years. Some learned how to do certain tasks; others became so valuable to us we came to rely on them for many different things ranging from interviews in Washington, web searching, designing the web site itself, checking the accuracy of work done by others, training staff, developing coding schemes and coding data, and finally analyzing our results. In a few cases, you will see these senior students listed as co-authors on papers and publications resulting from the project. Here, we want to acknowledge the hard work and contributions of all our student workers.

Christine Mahoney started as an undergraduate at the beginning of the project and stayed on as a graduate student. She has been involved in almost every aspect of the project ranging from web searches right up to conducting interviews in Washington and supervising and training other staff. During 2004-05 she will be on a Fulbright Fellowship conducting her dissertation research on lobbying in the European Union in Brussels.

Tim La Pira, at Rutgers, also conducted interviews for us during summer 2002, and coded some of the data in 2002-03. Tim received an NSF dissertation award for 2004-05 to support his own PhD dissertation on lobbying in Washington, DC.

Nick Semanko, currently a law student at Boston University, was instrumental in designing our web site and oversaw many aspects of the project during his last two years of undergraduate studies. Nick's brother Andy started working on the project even before enrolling as a freshman here at Penn State and has worked on the project as the web master for three years. Matt Levendusky, currently a graduate student at Stanford, worked on designing the web site and on other coding issues when he was at Penn State as an undergraduate. Thanks to each of these students for their special contributions.

Midori Valdivia worked on the project for over two years as an undergraduate and came to be one of the students we relied on for our most difficult coding decisions and tricky cases. She worked hard on many aspects of the project. She begins during 2004-05 on a senior honors thesis unrelated to the project, and we wish her good luck!

Other Penn State graduate students who worked on the project include: Daniel Jones-White, Heather Ondercin, Amber Boydstun, Kevin Egan, Young Kim, Josh Vermette, Sushmita Chatterjee, Stephanie Korst, Asma Abbas, Hugh Bouchelle, Gretchen Carnes, and Jen Schoonmaker. Patrick Hennes also worked on the project under the supervision of David Kimball at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

We would like to thank the following Penn State undergraduates who contributed enormously to the building of this website and on other project-related tasks: Steven Dzubak, Julie Sandell, Lauren Cerminaro, John Riley, Phil Thompson, Julie Sandell, Darrin Gray, Sarah Hlibka, Matt Iaconetti, Mary Lehrer, Michelle O'Connell, Susanne Pena, Carl Rathjen, Roberto Santoni, Jennifer Teters, and Adam Spurchise. We would also like to thank undergraduates Katrina Romain, Brian Blaise, Neel Aroon, David Hall, John Baer, and Josh Beail-Farkas for their efforts.

At Rutgers, undergraduates Kristen Beckbissinger, Daisy Bang, Kelly Ferraro, Peter Geller, Lauren Oleykowski, Venesa Pagan and Diane Hickey helped Beth Leech on various aspects of data collection. Similarly, at Missouri-St. Louis, Matt McLaughlin helped David Kimball on data collection tasks. At Tufts, Erin Desmarais worked with Jeff Berry.