i majored in government and economics at clark and i did my doctorate at mit in cambridge where i was surrounded by a lot of boston red sox fans which although the merest colors are red sox colors that's not my team  let's go back in time when did you start thinking about college was a freshman year high school senior high school when my brother was six years older than me so i had actually visited colleges when he was at school and then also straight or at vassar college so i sort of grew up with college stuff around so i think i always sort of knew i was going to go to college and i guess the key thing was you know what kind of school the g i graphy my father used to say could go anywhere we take no longer than three hours for a pork chop to defrost in my mother's freezer so i put came to merest you know several years after that and i thought it was very interesting for an undergraduate i think that size really matters you don't know for my way of thinking i didn't want a huge university at that point to do my eventual research i wanted to be in small classes get to know my faculty i think the the opportunity to get to know three or four faculty really well while you're an undergraduate to me makes all the difference here and i think that's and that's what clarke provided nothing in some ways maris does the same you know i don't remember way back when now all the midterms i took in the papers i wrote but i do remember those faculty who had an impact on me and i think if you have you know three four five faculty you who make an impact on you that you get to understand their way of thinking their perspectives you learn to be more of a critical thinker in your own right and you know the facts you know now you google now and you know you've got those another way of getting all those kind of information yeah so you graduate from there you go to mit and that's the big university for the advance or green if people want to go into that oddly enough i grew up in because i was actually born in pick see which is already puts me kind of like in a category unto myself but the so my family was here they were originally from new york city but because of job things my parents moved up here actually in the late forties and i grew up in poughkeepsie although i must say it was a very different town back then sort of a mixture of cows and computers we had agrarian and  m that was sort of the whole thing and new york city was really a trip now new york city seems to be a lot closer because there's so much more can and hasn't moved but it's a it's kind of like a closer in terms of the social interactions and the like so students here at merest really  avail themselves through internships and just weekend stuff to get to the city but so so i was already familiar with with merest and for me with the kids thing and it was fortunately an opening in political science which is what my  training is and i was able to apply for that and you know ran you know took courses some courses i never even had as a student but you know you learn fast you never work harder than you do as a new faculty member those are  go freshman sophomore junior senior and i give myself one degree and i go again so right now i'm a sophomore and i've got ten b a's put in put away so i think at some point i asked for an honorary degree but not quite there yet you know did the initiation of that put and it grew out of the course i was teaching in elections in voting behavior and it was actually suggested by a student that if we were doing this why don't we do a poll  of so that group organized the class itself organized over one hundred students and on election day we did it was a local county executive race and we scattered those kids all over duchess county which is where  and everything was hand tally this is the stone ages we hand tally do in the day and and then we went on a local radio station and with students and lies the results as they came in and the other thing was the outcome was a very surprise for this grew from students and it's always been an educational program of the college it has a huge public relations benefit so we partner now fast forward forty years with n b c in the wall street journal and n p r and p b s and know use it and it's you know in this day and age of social media it goes out in the old days we used to send things through snail mail we used to send our reports over to the copy center and then they would probably mimeograph it for all i know back that looks a little differently now so it's always been an educational program and so there are coursework internships we have student lecturers come on campus from the world of media politics and polling right now this  doing a course on one hundred sixty eight the year that rocked fifty years ago that is that rocked american politics and we're bringing in people great media people from you know who have been scholars vietnam and and civil rights in the elections during that time which are so so such fear of a people for society and so i try to mix what students are polling on with what the outside world of journalism politics is also dealing with and then we take kids up to new hampshire for the presidential primary and they go you know right on the ground and they see it up close and personal we stop in and we meet with chuck todd and meet the press because he's our partner with n b c yeah and so we want the students have a front row seat maris to what's going on in the world us so is it just majority polling just on the elections or is a polling firm like all different well we do elections a sort of our bread and butter but you know we cover one baseball opening day questions on whether you know the netting people are happy with the netting be explained we do that with bryant gumbel's real sports program on h b o so we partner with them to do that we do new year's eve resolutions and we even do my birthday i started when i was thirty nine years old asking one question in the spring do you consider thirty nine to be young middle aged or old and i thought that was kind of fun it was fun then but it's changed but now i'm stuck i got to do it every year and so the numbers aren't bad particularly among those people who are eighty or over they think someone in their sixty's not so bad the millennial they've had it with me i'll tell you but so when we do and we do a lot of issue polling so the economy approval ratings of elected officials health care the job picture education so soar into public policy issues but the stuff that tracks a lot of attention is who's going to win and who's going to lose and by how much yeah so so this this past election i guess was a big one with hillary and there was a there was a confusion over what the polls did the polls actually were accurate and that we had hillary ahead by one point in the national poll among the popular vote one by two so that was fine but there was a whole new group of folks showed up and they were these pro five thirty eight and you go in all these you know huffington post and they were sort of doing their models they would take polls and they put their own special sauce on them and they came up with there's a ninety six percent chance hillary clinton was going to win and people were really thrown by that and the conclusion was that somehow the polls were wrong the polls refine it's what happened to him once we sent him out the door and it got very confusing people were surprised not the people who were doing the polls as much as the media and the people who are doing these pr ications it's hard to communicate uncertainty to a broader audience sure we know if it i say tomorrow is a fifty percent chance of rain you know what that means and if it rains or doesn't it's a big deal  may i tell you there's a ninety eight percent chance that hillary clinton is going to get elected and donald trump wins then you can say web site about yeah and so you know that that's where the problem like yeah now how about the students how do they get involved in the public  ts great what would they do to get involved but we have an army of students there from all majors you don't come to maris college because you want to be the next george gallup or something you know become tomorrow's college for you know well rounded education prepares you for  important jobs in the workplace or to go on to graduate school if you like or law school would have you so that that was the students we attract very often their freshman year we actually contact them before they come on campus and they've agreed to come to merest and th interviewing itself they get trained it's a professional you know state of the art phoning center that we have in the hancock building and new building on campus three four five years old now seven eight nine years a very good numbers hard work it has to be done precisely and we have the more advanced students supervise the freshman and sophomore students we have about two hundred fifty students in the project at any one time and they work one day a week as i s and the best thing i do educate from from a faculty standpoint is when i see a junior or senior giving feedback to a freshman or sophomore about because they're listening into the interviews  what they did you know the good things areas of improvement and ending also with some positive feedback i think that's what prepares students for life after college because no matter what job they're going to be in  they have to be either in a supervisory capacity or they're going to getting feedback and to do that as an undergraduate is a special opportunity and i might add i get feedback from a lot of students and one thing they say is we you know we learned to talk now i think students think they know to talk when they come here but they really get used to handling questions and you know fielding information you know and that interaction and over the course of their four years of the say really in a sense come to a job interview and boy they're good so is it really phone work that you're doing right the resume social media well we do a little bit more of that and we're going to be setting up a whole news feed newsroom where we're going to have the dissemination of the information which will be much more social media there then we do we do do a podcast currently called pulse hub and and that's a weekly production that we put together  but the students are involved in collecting the information by phone and talking to people and then involved in questionnaire writing the collection of the picking of the samples of the people we  interview supervising as they said we have about twenty students who are our core group who helped organize all of this so it's a professional look n b c in the wall street journal would not be associated with this if they thought this was a bunch of kids making phone calls the farthest thing from that so now it is there is their course credits for it as well well you can get from the coursework we keep we provide courses in political communication public opinion  politics survey research those are all regular courses as part of the political science curriculum and those are open to all students and but the polling itself and i'd like to stress is that you know we have students from all majors who do the interviewing for some it's a just a job on campus yeah yeah it's not maybe the hardest job it's also the highest paying student job so there's a tradeoff there but it's also you know i think students it's not for everyone but for those students who latch on to this this is sort of like another home america it's a place they get to meet or staff many of whom are alarms of the college so they you know they interact we have a network of people who've gotten jobs so when you see you come to me and say i'd like to work in washington well i've got people down there who graduated way within the last five years who are eager to show you around because someone else showed them around so the latter has to be there we always t learning about you know the private sector world of surveys and public opinion so who comes up with the questions do you write the questions did they come from a variety of sources student suggestions our  very often the things that we've asked in the past become trend so we will repeat those as a given and then also the media clients i mean that's a it's great to have you know the people at n b c the wall street journal saying hey why don't we ask about this because they're the ones who are in the you know in the newsrooms down there yeah i daily basis so lucky right now in washington the news is changing by the hour right and to have those folks and also the people at n p r and who we also partner with to have those professionals relating to maris college students about the survey we're going to collect in the data we're going to put together but that's really kind of like that sort of the real thing it's like playing y if you're double a baseball team but you're actually playing at yankee stadium and you're pitching but the catcher is sanchez it's the real deal so so how about the polls themselves is it is it just the  governorships that we want to be following probably more senate not because it's so critical who takes the majority in the senate in the house of representatives and we'll see we'll probably be following you know six to ten of those races and they could be anywhere right now we're going to interact with our sponsors our media partners to see which states we think and they think are important and interesting lee it's sort of very often a like mind so you know we that one look you know no no no one actually polls if you look in the fine print it always says the forty eight states really because of the time zone changes so when you hear any poll of americans it's actually forty eight states so we have been updated really but yes we start in the east coast and we work our way through you know the central the midwest and end up in the pacific now from the seventy's until now have have you seen the classes growing at leaps and bounds yea stats so i mean this is this was a a you know we were talking before the program i mean you know the building we're in right now with this great studio you know when i came to my wrist was an outdoor natural fed swimming pool and this was the northern end of campus and right now the northern end of this almost like the middle of campus we grew a little bit to the south we grew a lot across route nine to the east but we really grew to the north so marriage has just grown in leaps and bounds and there's a huge advantage to that because if you build a building let's say in the last five years you wire that building for the latest in technology and computer stuff and like our studio our office area has a t studio as well not like unlike this one and we're connected fiber optic connection into new york city and we can broadcast also from our offices at the merest pole to anywhere in the world live or on tape but  because and part of that is because the building has been built in the last year they say four years six years eight years recently i think it's actually two thousand and ten so so do you do you get a lot of celebrity or personalities that come to  the ones who are particularly those of the a bigger name person but the ones who also are the ones who are twenty three years old twenty four years old a production assistant at c n n who now will invite have a current soon come down give them the tour sure show how the internship worked how they got an entry level job i mean that's you know that's going to be part of what we're providing for students because that's the experience we have to be able to ensure people are paying a lot of money to go to college and there's gotta be the value added of knowing your faculty in a very you know i was just at an event a breakfast indeed still human members going to that he was actually in the group that went to the local radio station afterwards when he talked about the results and now that it became part of that he gets to see the merest poll grow up as he's grown up sure and it's all one in the same so it on growing their poll yeah i mean there are a lot of college polls now we were the first to use undergraduate students in this capacity and we're probably one of the few still who focuses on the education of the students vice presidents and maris so they said i'm going to get me one of them things the difference of merit is you you really get to do the forums the seminars the internships the coursework it's not just you know a lot of communication majors will do because you know they might be interested in journalism for example and then you get students we have students who you know you know somebody wants to do bio medicine and you know that's part of research i mean it's similar theory to collecting information and there so they're interested in taking a course in survey research so they can learn about how to read data and better understand it that's not for the freshmen and sophomores but certainly for the upper class folks and there's a lot of you know i mean i go around the class i do two things semester students obviously their name but you know what their major is two things with their major is where they're from and the second thing i can think is very often they say and the third thing is you know what it will be when they grow up which freshmen obviously don't have as big a handle on that very often and that's totally cool because this should be like a candy store you go in you pick what you want you learn i mean that's what this should be about and in the students you know i'm finding different things that the majors and the career aspirations are very different and also it merest where they're from it's a much more diverse ethnically much more diverse racially more diverse geographically this is a very very interesting college because it's been so dynamic and because it's changed and it's grown and there's a there's a sense of you know in an organization you know i guess it can go to sports analogy you know if you're kind of like the underdog but then you make it to the championship  from my own experience was that as an undergraduate it's good to get to a place where you will have the resources available but also those small classes you know the classes i do if i have twenty students in the class that's a lot and so i mean i know these kids i don't for two three four years and i very often get to meet their families which is also fun because they're very different when they're reading the pa they become kids but that's ok the parents leave they become our colleagues again but so i think an important thing is you know for people to to look at different schools but feel comfortable that this is a social environment a location and also they do feel comfortable with i think that's it and you know you're going to change careers five times maybe in your lifetime at this point those people aren't going to come when their kid didn't