I'm a 26-year-old political science graduate student who has a B.A. in political science from the University of South Florida. My minor was in mass communications (with an emphasis on journalism).
My leanings are conservative with a pretty good amount of libertarian. According to the World's Smallest Political Quiz, I am 100 pecent libertarian. I'm also a Baptist.
My interest in politics probably began during the 2000 presidential election coverage when I, like many others, was glued to my television set waiting to find out who eventually would become president. I found the whole process and the drama of it to be exciting.
My interest grew in my early time at college as I took a few classes dealing with government and politics. I later chose to major in political science.
I also had a love of talk radio (Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck being my favorites), cable news programs (Hannity & Colmes and Hardball being my favorites), and newspaper and Web site opinion columns (sites like World Net Daily and columnists like Walter Williams being among my favorites). Perhaps this contributed to my decision to minor in mass communications.
My first published opinion (unless you count a rather simple column I wrote in my school newspaper in junior high) was printed in the USF student newspaper, The Oracle, in response to a letter to the editor claiming evolution to be fact and creation to be false. As a Christian who had done quite a bit of study into the subject, after taking a evolution-promoting geology class my freshmen year at USF, I did not believe in evolution. So, I sent in a rebuttal, and it was published.
I also decided to start up my own small news and opinion site called Politics, News, Etc.(PNE), in which I wrote commentaries and also solicited others to contribute their own opinions as well.
In the spring of 2004, after noticing an ad in The Oracle for a columnist who preferred Bill O'Reilly over Michael Moore, I decided to give it a shot. I sent in a few samples of my writing from the PNE site, and the opinion editors decided that they wanted me to contribute a weekly column to the paper.
That spring I also had the chance to intern with a local state representative and take a trip to Tallahassee.
I continued to write columns during the summer as well, which leads me to when I decided to create this site to post links to most of my columns and commentaries, as well as my random thoughts and some of my favorite links (not to mention this bio).
Even though I graduated in May of 2005, I continued to write columns for The Oracle during that summer.
In the summer of 2005, I was selected to be on The Tampa Tribune's first Board of Community Columnists. I wrote around one column per month for the Tribune for a year.
I returned to USF for my M.A. in political science in the spring of 2007. |
