Introduction

Welcome to The Valence of Ignorance, the personal blog of Nick Goedert.  I’m not sure why you would be reading this if you don’t already know me, but I guess you never know on the internet.  I am a graduate student in American Politics at Princeton University, where I hope to receive my PhD at some point within the next two years and pursue an academic job…but there are of course no guarantees at this point.  My main interests lie in legislative elections, and I am working on a dissertation on congressional gerrymandering. 

Before coming to grad school, I worked in political polling for the Democratic Party, and legislative analysis for the state of Maryland.  I am originally from Silver Spring, Maryland, and still consider it my home despite living the last three years in New Jersey and being unlikely to return in my foreseeable professional future;  I have remained a loyal Baltimore Orioles fan through thirteen consecutive losing seasons.  As for my personal politics, I would describe myself as Fabian socialist, although you can decide for yourself as you read my blog.  I generally just vote for whichever candidate favors more progressive taxation (hint: this is almost never the Republican).

Outside of my academic work, I am a serious amateur poker player, mostly in live cash games in Atlantic City.  I entered (and cashed!) in my first World Series of Poker event last summer, and I plan to be entering several more in 2011.  I also have deep interests in music (singing, playing guitar, and listening to Britpop), TV, and board games (especially of German origin). 

I do not intend for this to be a blog about my daily life.  I intend to post whenever I feel I have something interesting to write about, that will be of interest to people other than myself and the people I talk to in my daily life.  So you won’t hear about how much I won or lost in a poker session, or which of my football teams won over the weekend, or how frustrated I am in my dissertation progress.  As my interests tend toward politics and poker, most of my posts will be on these topics, but certainly not confined to them.  I will try to keep them timely, but I make no guarantees, and I don’t intend to be posting every day.  I hope that being realistic and selective in what I choose to post will prevent me from burning out and completely abandoning the blog after a couple weeks, but we’ll see…