By Chloe Landen
Gerard Apruzzese arrived at the University of Texas at Austin in the Fall of 2017 with a passion for numbers and ambitions to obtain a math degree from the College of Natural Sciences. Yet, as is the case for many undergraduates, things did not go exactly as planned. After experiencing a course registration hiccup, Gerard could not enroll in the classes he had planned for his second semester. Unsure of what to do, his roommate offered a solution. Several courses were offered within the Religious Studies department that spring—many of them with open seats. Gerard took a leap of faith. What happened next Gerard could have never predicted: he fell in love with the study of religion. By the second week of the semester, Gerard had switched his major to Religious Studies. Looking back at his undergraduate years, he describes this decision as the best he ever made at UT.
The choice to pursue a degree in Religious Studies was as personal as it was educational for Gerard. Before arriving at the forty acres, Gerard had already been wrestling with his relationship to the religion he was raised with. Exploring religion in an academic setting gave him the tools to grapple with his youth while also learning about the ways that religion is woven into the fabric of the nation’s culture. Under the guidance of Religious Studies faculty Dr. Chad Seales and Dr. Brent Landau, Gerard grew immensely as a student and a scholar within the Department of Religious Studies, eventually producing a senior-year thesis project where he unearthed his affection for the research process. Yet, despite his success, Gerard could still feel the zeal for numbers that had defined his high school experience and knew that it was missing from his research. Could his inclination toward quantitative research be combined with his commitment to Religious Studies?
After graduating with a Religious Studies degree in 2021, Gerard returned to UT the following academic year with this question in mind, setting out to obtain a Bachelor’s in Sociology. There, he encountered scholarship that combined qualitative and quantitative methods in ways he had never seen before and appealed to him. His experiences within the Department of Sociology drove him to join the University of Chicago’s Data and Policy Summer Scholar Program after graduating again in 2022. The program masterfully blended data analytics with research in the policy world, and Gerard realized he had found his calling. He entered Columbia University’s Master of Public Administration in the fall of 2023.
Gerard remained intent on combining his Religious Studies interests with his passion for data and policy, but it was not until he enrolled in a fall 2024 Text Analysis course that he had the chance. As the class drew to a close, Gerard produced a final report titled “God on the Ballot,” which examined religious themes and speeches given at the Democratic and Republican national conventions from FDR until this past election cycle. Interested in observing the way that religion was utilized by political candidates differently over time, he was fascinated by his research’s findings. But what is more, the write-up’s merging of quantitative data and methodology with religious studies represented a full-circle moment for Gerard.
As Gerard approaches his MPA graduation this spring, his career plans remain ambitious, aiming to tie together policy, data analysis, and religious studies. At the moment, his eyes are set on joining a non-profit in a research role or utilizing his data analytic skills to benefit the New York City government, but in the future Gerard envisions himself completing a PhD in Economics with broad interests in examining discrimination in the United States. He remains determined to continue combining his passion for Religious Studies in all that he accomplishes in the future, which he imagines will be far from difficult given the entwinement of religion in culture, history, and economics. Regardless of what Gerard’s future holds, his broader academic and professional engagement—from UT’s Religious Studies department to Columbia’s MPA program and beyond—is a testament to the breadth of the study of religion.
Gerard Apruzzese is an MPA candidate at Columbia University who will graduate this spring. He recently wrote and publicized a report titled “God on the Ballot: Text Analysis of Religious Rhetoric in Nominating Convention Speeches, 1932-2024” which examined religious themes and speeches given at the Democratic and Republican national conventions from FDR until Donald Trump’s most recent campaign.
Chloe Landen is a PhD student in the Religion of the Americas concentration within UT’s Department of Religious Studies. Her work focuses on U.S. Protestantism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with particular interests in the social gospel movement and narratives of belonging. She is currently engaged in a research project examining the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL) and the connections between anti-lynching activism, religion, and the privatization of execution.