Nicolle Hendzel

Nicolle Hendzel is a sophomore majoring in International Relations and Music with a strong interest in Russian language studies. She spoke with us about her experience studying IR at Stanford.

What have been your favorite classes so far?

I am still fairly early in the major so I have not taken too many IR classes yet, but I have focused on integrating my specializations, International Security and Europe & Russia, into my other classwork. One example is the Iran and Iraq case study I did in my THINK class titled "(Un)Intentional Democratization: How the Violation of Sovereignty is the Solution to the Problem of Pluralistic Disagreement in Creating Citizen-Centered Government." Another case study I did was in my ECON 162 class on Games Developing Nations Play. This project was titled, "From Convoluted to Clear: How Game Theory Can Be Used to Simplify Complicated Historical Events Like the 1917 Russian February Revolution." I have discovered early on at Stanford that no matter the class, I have found a way to study the most interesting dilemmas in international security.

What’s an IR project that specifically stood out to you as meaningful?

Two IR experiences that tie into each other as being equally meaningful were two separate research projects. The first one was a PWR 1 project titled, "Trust, The Lesser Evil, and The Complete Good: Russian Twitter Bots' Manipulation of the 2016 United States Presidential Election and Our Hand in It." In this paper, I searched through thousands of Russian Bot tweets and analyzed their language and the impact they had on the 2016 election. I investigated its connection to demagoguery, the voters themselves, and the psychology behind the event. In my conclusion, I refer to the GOP's role in prolonging the ramifications of this type of inflammatory rhetoric and how such rhetoric is truly useless in the long run.

The other project was a research project I conducted in INTLPOL 268D. This project was especially interesting because I was able to structure my own grassroots project using the internet research tools I learned in the course. I settled on a project that is now titled, "Saudi Arabia's Disinformation Campaign Network Aimed at Yemen: The Proliferation of Retweet Rings on Twitter." Though similar to the PWR 1 topic research essay, there are meaningful differences in its character. During this course, I had discovered a suspicious account, which eventually led me to a major retweet ring seemingly run by the Saudi Arabian government to target Yemeni citizens with disinformation (all alleged). I identified multiple suspicious hashtags, as well as found many accounts associated with them that followed similar suspicious behavior. My research concluded that the Saudi Arabian retweet ring farm followed a specific pattern in account creation and tweet dissemination that would make it easy for the proper authorities to locate and ban these accounts.

Both these IR experiences were meaningful for multiple reasons, one being that I had the opportunity at Stanford to design a project and discover on my own a root cause and associated features of specific international security issues. I also located and identified national security threats that are prevalent today. These experiences are also important because they target social media, a platform of communication much like Russian and music are a medium for communication (my experience has led me to believe that music acts as a common language between cultures, much like social media). It is these communicative skills that I hope to use in a future career in the IR field.