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By Elise Rolandson
Paul Sum not only teaches political science, he lives it.
Sum came to the University of North Dakota in 2000, and teaches courses in comparative and international politics.
He finds teaching very rewarding. “The students teach me how best to explain things and what is important and what is not. Feedback is really important,” says Sum. He believes that being very engaged in both research and the classroom makes him more passionate about what he is teaching.
Sum earned bachelor’s degrees in economics and political science from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and planned to continue his graduate studies in economics. His graduate education blended his two interests as he studied political science with an emphasis in economic questions and applications. He graduated from Northwestern University with a doctorate in political science in 1996.
After graduating, Sum taught at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, where he was able to observe Romanian’s transition to democracy. “The transition was moving, but it was not entirely clear what was going to happen,” says Sum. His academic appointment in Romania was funded through the United States Information Agency with the purpose of establishing a new faculty of political science. Besides teaching and conducting research, he engaged in curriculum development and worked with the university to integrate the new program into the existing university structure. “Today it is a very strong department and I have built relationships that will last a lifetime. At least a dozen of my students have earned doctorates at institutions worldwide,” says Sum. He continues to hold the position of lecturer at that department, teaching summer courses and supervising graduate student projects.
In fall 2007, he spent three weeks in Romania after he was invited to join a team that evaluated the USAID civil society development program, which has been in place since the revolution. Sum studied the successes of the development program, and the team discussed how to duplicate them, minimize the shortcomings, and the extent to which this approach to democratization could be used in other countries. The team conducted over 200 interviews with social organizations, parliamentarians, local government officials, government officials, and business and media people.
Among his other accomplishments, he has served as country co-director in Romania for two large- scale comparative survey data collection projects. They were the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and the Citizenship and Involvement Democracy project, where he conducted national post-election surveys, national opinion polls, and city-wide polls in Romania and Moldova.
He has received several awards from UND for teaching excellence, research, and service, and the UND political science department has received the University Award for Outstanding Departmental Teaching. Sum has been published in scholarly journals such as Eastern European Politics and Society, Law and Social Inquiry, Europe-Asia Studies, and Romanian Journal of Society and Politics.
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