When 9/11 changed his trajectory, Jim Mignano found his calling in political science
These days, Jim Mignano works as an assistant policy researcher at the RAND Corporation while simultaneously pursuing his Ph.D. in policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School in Santa Monica, California. Working with the program’s Technology Applications and Implications research stream, he conducts research side by side with economists and anthropologists, ethnographers and engineers, all working to find innovative solutions to real-world challenges. It’s fast-paced, cutting edge work, and Mignano is solidly in his element. But it wasn’t always this way.
Twenty years ago, back when Mignano first started college at the University of San Diego, he wasn’t remotely interested in political science. At the time, he was studying aeronautical engineering, his sights set on joining the navy and becoming a naval aviator.
“I just wanted to fly cool planes,” he said. “That’s all I cared about.”
Then, right at the beginning of his sophomore year, 9/11 happened. With a world-changing act of terrorism dominating the headlines, the conversations in his classroom and community turned to war. For the first time, Mignano started to really think about what global conflict could mean for his future.
“There was some sabre rattling going on, and I saw that things were changing rather quickly,” he explained. “I started thinking, ‘I want to fly planes, but what happens if I’m ordered to drop bombs on some village? Or maybe even to drop bombs on a legitimate target but then I accidentally kill some civilians or something?”
Politics, once a subject Mignano found boring, abstract, and hardly applicable to his life or interests, suddenly became very real. The tragic events of 9/11, and the cultural and geo-political shifts that followed, pulled him out of his a-political shell and pushed him to begin asking questions about how power manifests, how people have (or lack) a say in political decision-making, and the real-world impact of global politics on everyday people. It changed his life trajectory forever.
Instead of joining the Navy, Mignano reconsidered his priorities and dropped out of college. Yet his interest in politics only grew. He became a voracious reader—inhaling political theories and scholarly tomes like air; exhaling his new knowledge to anyone who would listen. Quite by accident, Jim Mignano had found his calling.
Many years later, he found himself living in Portland, Oregon. When he got a job at PSU, he started taking classes to finish his undergraduate degree. While working full time, he chipped away at a bachelor’s degree in political science, and then moved on to pursue his masters—slowly and steadily taking a class or two every term, bit by bit learning all he could.
“I hate to put it this way, but my story with PSU is partly a story of convenience,” Mignano laughed. “I can tell you how much I love the faculty or how much I love the political science program, and all those things are true, but honestly PSU can just be really convenient for people who are in a situation like mine—working full time, commuting, and juggling other responsibilities.”
Supported by his wife, and encouraged by the PSU Political Science faculty, Mignano finished his coursework, wrote a thesis on blockchain technology in international relations, and earned his master’s degree in 2020. The next fall, Mignano moved to sunny California to start his PhD in Policy Analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Though he’s only a year and a half into his doctoral program, he has already completed his qualifying exams, is nearly done with required coursework, and has already begun outlining his dissertation. In short, things are moving fast and going well.
Looking to the future, Mignano hopes to be able to do “a little bit of everything.” After earning his PhD, he hopes to find work at a think tank like The RAND Corporation, but also to have opportunities to teach part time and put his expertise to work through consulting with policy makers or tech companies.
“No matter what direction I take, I know I’m going to keep using the skills I developed at PSU through the master’s program,” he said. “I’m already putting what I learned at PSU into practice, and I imagine that will only continue.”