George Washington University undergraduate Michelle Shevin-Coetzee will present her original research to lawmakers and members of Congress during the 19th annual Posters on the Hill event held Wednesday and Thursday at the U.S. Capitol.
The research fair, sponsored by the Council on Undergraduate Research, gives college students the opportunity to showcase their work and underscores the importance of undergraduate research experiences for policymakers and funding agency representatives.
Ms. Shevin-Coetzee is among the 60 students selected from 500 applicants around the country and is the first GW undergraduate in at least a decade selected to participate in the prestigious event.
“Posters on the Hill has been on my radar since I learned about it a few years ago,” said Ms. Shevin-Coetzee, a senior in the Elliott School of International Affairs from Potomac, Md. “And after undertaking research this year, I was very excited to find out I would have somewhere to present my findings.”
Her project—which investigates flaws within the Department of Defense’s budgeting process— stems from her four years as a policy intern at the Pentagon, as well as from a course taught by Stephen Biddle, a professor of political science and international affairs.
“It was a really fantastic class on military technology assessments,” Ms. Shevin-Coetzee said. “I learned about how you evaluate tradeoffs and make the best use of time and resources, which got me thinking about processes within the Department of Defense.”
Ms. Shevin-Coetzee then applied for the Elliott School Undergraduate Scholars program, an enhanced independent research opportunity that provides juniors and seniors with support and resources to produce meaningful projects. Once accepted to the program, she worked with Dr. Biddle to finalize her topic.
After a decade of war, the Department of Defense faces difficult choices as it determines how to allocate funding during times of a shrinking budget, Ms. Shevin-Coetzee writes in her abstract. The Pentagon’s current budgeting process requires each military service to submit proposals and make an independent assessment of which programs require funding to execute a successful defense strategy.
“Fearing deep cuts, the services justify extraneous programs to maintain their share of the pie,” the abstract says. “Given this incentive structure, there are deep discrepancies between the ‘theory’ codified in manuals for military programmers and the ‘practice’ by which senior officials develop the budget.”
To determine how Pentagon leaders could attempt to narrow that gap and budget more effectively, Ms. Shevin-Coetzee interviewed 20 academics, military personnel and government officials. By the end of her research, she identified three discrepancies in the DoD budgeting process and developed a series of recommendations for Pentagon and Congressional leadership.
“What I especially admire about Michelle is how she has seized the opportunity to integrate her professional experiences with her academic concentration in security policy,” said Paul Hoyt-O’Connor, director of GW’s Center for Undergraduate Fellowships and Research. “I'm thrilled that the Elliott School Undergraduate Scholars program has supported Michelle's research and that she is now able to share the fruits of that work with members of Congress and their staffs.”
Ms. Shevin-Coetzee said she is looking forward to speaking with members of Congress about how the Department of Defense can better plan and execute military spending.
“I think they’ll be interested in seeing how the 2011 Budget Control Act and sequestration is impacting the department,” she said. “In general, we can do a better job of educating Capitol Hill about why these across-the-board cuts are so detrimental.”
Beyond her internship with the Department of the Defense, Ms. Shevin-Coetzee stays busy at GW as president of the university’s branch of Women in International Security, which she founded during her sophomore year. The GW senior also studied abroad at the University of Cambridge. She said that the university’s style of learning, which emphasized depth over breadth, inspired her to dig more deeply into a research topic of her own once she returned to GW. After graduation, she hopes to work at a think tank and eventually continue her studies in graduate school.
She has one piece of advice for other undergraduates who are “even a little bit interested” in pursuing research: Go for it.
“If you take a topic that you really want to explore more and feel that you can make a contribution to the field,” she said, “then you can’t go wrong.