A few weeks ago I got my letter from the Senior Vice Chancellor approving my promotion to Professor (beginning next term). It’s a pretty surreal feeling. I’ve worked hard, but I’ve also benefited from a lot of good fortune along the way.

When I enrolled as an undergrad at the University of South Carolina about 20 years ago, this was definitely not the path I saw myself taking. At various times I saw myself going to law school or trying to get into federal law enforcement. Around the time I started seriously looking ahead to graduation and next steps, the Great Recession was in full swing, and the job market seemed pretty scary. John Burrow pulled me aside after class one day and said I should think about applying to the MA program. He saw potential in me and gave me the vote of confidence I needed to take a chance. Worst case, I figured, two years of grad school would buy some time for the economy and job market to improve.

So I applied, got accepted, and was assigned to Alli Rojek as a teaching assistant. I found the first year in the program pretty easy. A lot more reading and writing of course, and I’m sure there were times I was stressed out, but I don’t remember it being all that bad. Then some personal challenges put me in kind of a dark place for the first half of my second year, and I had no idea what was next for me. I waffled back and forth for a few weeks about whether to take Comps or write a thesis, as well as whether to apply for the PhD program. Ultimately I took Comps and did apply for the PhD program (which, lucky for me, had just been created 3 years prior).¹

My first semester in the PhD program went smoothly as far as I remember. But the second semester was really tough. I had Research Methods with Geoff Alpert where I read things like Making it Count by Stanley Lieberson, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, and a bunch of stuff by Hubert Blalock. We had to write 2 essays every week and I consistently got C’s or worse in the beginning. I questioned myself and thought about dropping out a few times. Lucky for me I’d made some good friends in the program and they were always around to talk some sense into me. Then around mid-semester something finally clicked. Over spring break we had to read and write a reaction essay for Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck. I remember getting an A and Geoff saying “Good job - you get it.” That gave me such a boost. After that, I genuinely enjoyed his class and writing all those papers.

In my second and third years, I worked as Jeff Rojek’s GA on a Smart Policing Initiative grant from BJA. The (rather lofty) goal of the grant was “organizational change” - basically, to get the organization to move toward a more “intelligence-led” mentality. This had me embedded in the local police department’s Crime Analysis Unit 2-3 days per week, and introduced me to work by Jerry Ratcliffe, David Carter, and others. I’d already passed my first comp,² and this project became the motivation for my second comp - a longer-form essay on the history of policing innovations, culminating in an oral defense before my committee (Jeff Rojek, Scott Wolfe, and Bob Kaminski).

Ideally, a lot of what I wrote for my second comp would’ve been used for the first few chapters of my dissertation, which at the time I thought would be a case study of organizational change in this agency. Unfortunately, the agency had been experiencing a good deal of executive turnover and at some point I realized it was going to be a dead end as far as my dissertation was concerned. This ended up being a good thing though, because here again, I got lucky. First, Scott Wolfe had joined the faculty during my second year in the program, and he’d gotten me interested in procedural justice and police legitimacy (Tom Tyler’s work, of course, but also Justice Tankebe, Jon Jackson, and Tal Jonathan-Zamir). And second, when I approached Jeff with a half-baked idea to completely switch up my dissertation, which he had agreed to chair, he trusted me, gave me the green light, and funded the print and postage costs for my surveys. We agreed it made more sense for Scott to serve as chair given his topical expertise - and he was willing. Jeff and Geoff served as committee members, and Geoff helped connect me with Tal, who agreed to serve as my external reader.³

I defended my dissertation in February 2015 and a few months later my wife and I packed everything up and moved to Louisville, where I was an Assistant Professor for two years. I enjoyed my time there for the most part, but in the fall of 2016 my office phone rang one afternoon, and when I answered I heard a familiar voice on the other end: Ben Steiner. He’d been on faculty at USC while I was there but had since relocated to UNO. He told me UNO was hiring and that I should apply. I thought WTH and sent in an application, even though I couldn’t really see myself moving to the Midwest. I applied to three other universities as well, but once I interviewed at UNO I knew it was where I wanted to be. I got the offer, and lucky for me, my wife was again willing to take the risk and move with me in 2017 to a city she’d never set foot in.

Over the years I’ve had the good fortune of collaborating with lots of smart people on papers and projects that I find both interesting and meaningful. Through this job I’ve met a lot of new people, many of whom have become friends. I’ve taught ~400 undergraduate and graduate students at UNO, and served on over a dozen thesis and dissertation committees. I helped create a lab. I’ve done 150+ media interviews and 200+ manuscript reviews.

And now, five years after getting tenured,⁴ I’ve made it to full. I’ve been known to complain from time to time (who among us?), but reflecting this way reminds me how much I love this job, my department, and my city. I’m proud of the effort I’ve put in, forever grateful to everyone who has helped and supported me, and happy to have gotten lucky on so many occasions during my journey.