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My Collegiate Track & Field Experience

In this post, I give you a complete narrative of my personal track and field experience. I document the highs, the lows, and the (eventually career-ending) injuries. I describe the successes, the failures, and everything in between; the mental health battles, the sacrifices, the brutal scrutiny, the love/hate relationships that developed, the exhaustion and physical agony, and I try not to spare you any details.                 She’s pretty lengthy. So decide now if you want to commit 20 minutes of your time reading it. This is your only warning. (:                  Full disclosure… I initially wrote this for myself. I didn’t really intend for it to go anywhere (until I was contacted by a couple of student-athlete mental health advocacy groups). In the effort of participating in the trend of “full transparency,” I – after much deliberation – decided to post this for those that were interested. I want people to understand that the reality of being a high-level college athlete is far
Recent posts

Chicago Crime Analysis

During my studies at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, my team and I completed a short project evaluating criminal patterns in the city of Chicago. Using five years of data from the Chicago Police Department plus data from the United States Sentencing Commission (USSC), we ran a detailed analysis in R to recommend the most efficient allocation of the Chicago PD's personnel resources to Chicago districts based on crime intensity and frequency. Our report includes a comprehensive plot of the suggested geographical location of all police units by latitude and longitude. Enjoy!

Why the American Healthcare System Needs Economists

It's no secret that the US healthcare system is a complex web of interconnected -- and sometimes contrasting -- objectives designed to both protect and profit off of American citizens. It's messy, and it's uninviting. Now, I'm aware that there is no "one size fits all" solution to the complexities of the US healthcare system, as it spans over 50 different states, each with their own laws and policies. It involves individuals, providers, healthcare firms, insurance companies, medical professionals, government policymakers, policy recipients, supply chains, international trade of pharmaceuticals and equipment, national funding, and the list goes on and on. Bottom line? It's complex, inefficient, and expensive.  Over the years, I've been trained to think like an economist, and I'd love nothing more than to offer my two cents on the healthcare system that we've currently got in place. As a quick overview, I simply want to discuss the system as what

Thesis: The Hometown Effect -- Quantifying the Power of Place

I wrote this economics thesis during my final year of undergrad in the spring of 2022. In the paper, I discuss and analyze the widespread opportunity atlas research; that the location of where an individual grows up has a lasting effect on their future economic prosperity. I specifically analyze the difference in outcomes between urban, suburban, and rural counties. There's a lot of information in here, but if it's something you're interested in, I suggest you give it a read! Additionally, check out Raj Chetty's interactive visual dataset known as the  opportunity atlas . You can toggle with the filters and explore the levels of wealth and poverty throughout the 50 United States, and see if you are beating the odds of the county that you grew up in!

The Effect of Total Offensive Yards on College Football Game Win Probabilities

          Even someone who knows absolutely nothing about sports could tell you that “the best offense is a good defense.” This adage expands outside the realm of sports into the world of strategy and combat. However, if you compare the draft ranks and salaries of defensive players to offensive players in the National Football League (NFL), it could lead you to question this assertion. What about college football, though?          Show your brothers and your dad this data, and urge them to consider defensive players more heavily when making picks from the Fantasy Football draft next year. Our data proves and discovers that relatively, the defense preventing yards is more valuable for the game outcome than the offense gaining yards. Who would've thought? The tables below go into more detail on how much of an effect each single variable has on the game.          Formally, w e examine the effect of one particular key statistic, total offensive yards, on the outcome of a football gam