Daniel Scott Smith

Being a PhD at the Stanford GSE is a tremendous experience. The ICE program gives you the freedom to explore your individual interests, yet also specialized content knowledge, skills, and mentorship in the area of international and comparative education and development. In my time in the program, I felt supported in exploring my many interests, taking intellectual risks, and cultivating a unique skill set that spans standard quantitative methods and new computational text analysis methods. The faculty care immensely about your work and wellbeing — if anything, they distinguish this program above all else in their generous attention and commitment to the program and your work as a developing scholar. Working as a TA with the ICE MA students was an especially meaningful experience — for them and for me — where, through the year-long program, everyone learns how to learn, mentor and get mentored, and bring a project initially expressed as a general research interest all the way to a full manuscript of publishable quality. Stanford is just an incredible place to live and work for these "chapters" of your life — brimming with opportunity, readily open to all kinds of diversity, and engineered to be a paradise for research, teaching, and learning. There is no better place or community than the ICE program at Stanford to spend half a decade growing, learning, and developing: as a researcher and a whole person.

Research interests: the cultural origin and conditions of the spread of state schooling in the long nineteenth century.

Before Stanford: I was a researcher for 2.5 years in Germany working on TIMSS and PIRLS at the Center for Research on Education and School Development (Dortmund). I got my M.Ed. in International Education Policy at Harvard and my B.A. in English with Interdisciplinary Honors in Education at Stanford.

After Stanford: I aim to be a faculty member of an interdisciplinary social science program researching and teaching the historical development of state school systems.