Ashley Anderson

As an undergraduate student at Stanford University, Ashley Anderson was a recent participant in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Scholarship and Fellowship Program, which is administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) on behalf of the DHS Science and Technology Directorate.

Anderson, whose research topic was Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior, performed research at START (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism), a DHS Center of Excellence based at the University of Maryland.

Below is a question and answer dialogue about Anderson's experience at START. These same questions and answers can be seen in video format by clicking the link on the right side of the page.

Please describe the program you are participating in.

So I work with the Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior Study and basically what we do is we research different ethnic groups and try to get information about certain characteristics like whether they participate in the electoral politics, what type of violence they are using, if they're using violence, and the purpose of this study is really to see what sociopolitical factors influence a group's decision to either use terrorism as a strategy or not use terrorism as a strategy.

What is ethnic terrorism and were you aware of such a concept before coming to START?

I think terrorism is basically attacks on civilians, which is the terrorism part, that is perpetrated by an ethnic group or organization that is claiming to represent an ethnic group, and ethnicity is basically you know, shared religion, shared language, etc. Did I have an idea of what it was? No, I didn't. I knew there was ethnic violence, but I just never thought of ethnic terrorism as a separate field. I just kind of thought people may be engaged in terrorism, maybe they were ethnic maybe they weren't.

What interesting things have you learned about the cultures you have studied thus far?

One of the most interesting things I learned was that most of the groups in the Middle East actually don't participate in terrorism. I used to think, you know, terrorism was rampant in the Middle East because that's all you see in U.S. news, but after looking at the data set I think only a third of the groups actually use terrorism as a strategy and some of them only used it for a year and then quit. So that is pretty interesting how many participate in politics and just regular types of protest.

How has this experience made you grow as a student?

As I student I think it's given me a lot of discipline as far as how to do good research, how to sit and code and go through a lot of articles at a really quick rate, and while that may not seem very relevant to everybody I think that if you're going to be a graduate student it's something you're definitely going to have to do because you're going to have to engage in your own research projects and most of the time you have to do it from the ground up, so I'm really glad I've gotten this experience.

How has it shaped your plans for your career goals?

I'd say it's shaped my career goals in two distinct ways. For graduate school, I guess that it has really given me the type of training that I need to be able to do to the research that I have to do in graduate school. It's also given me a focus for my graduate studies because before I just wanted to do ethnic conflicts, but now that there is this whole ethnic terrorism thing I'm very excited to kind of be at the forefront of this because it's new research.