\u00a0<\/em>won the 2019 Dalton Camp Award for the best essay on the link between media and democracy in Canada.<\/p>\nFriends of Canadian Broadcasting, who present the $10,000 prize annually, called Piccolo\u2019s essay \u201can eloquent first-hand account of the power of local journalism.\u201d<\/p>\n
Piccolo\u2019s foray into journalism began when he wrote a response to an op-ed in his local paper, something he says he would never have done had he not studied political theory.<\/p>\n
\u201cWithout taking any of the credit away from Sam himself, I\u2019d like to think that the fact that this award has been granted to a Brock graduate is a great testament to what we do here at Brock in Political Science,” says Professor Leah Bradshaw.<\/p>\n
Although initially skeptical of the importance of reading Plato, Piccolo found himself \u201cutterly transfixed\u201d by Bradshaw\u2019s lectures on ancient and medieval political theory.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would emerge in a trance,\u201d he says. \u201cI couldn\u2019t wait to go back.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bradshaw calls Piccolo one of the best and most interesting students she\u2019s encountered in more than 30 years as a professor at Brock.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe has a gift for observation and writing,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Along with Bradshaw, Piccolo says Political Science Associate Professors Paul Hamilton and Stefan Dolgert were particularly influential.<\/p>\n
Bradshaw and Dolgert nurtured his interest in political theory, which Piccolo calls \u201ca completely different way of thinking about politics that really gets beyond the left-right spectrum.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hamilton\u2019s propensity to supplement the syllabus with non-academic sources introduced Piccolo to a host of books and movies. In first year, Piccolo filled the margins of his class notes with titles to check out. By the time he got to fourth year, he could reference those films and novels in class discussions, to Hamilton\u2019s delight.<\/p>\n
Feedback from Dolgert in a fourth-year guided reading course put Piccolo on the path to Notre Dame.<\/p>\n
After submitting his first paper, Piccolo received an email from Dolgert urging him to pursue a graduate degree, including a list of potential universities.<\/p>\n
\u201cUntil then, it hadn\u2019t occurred to me that I could ever go to one of these prestigious schools,\u201d Piccolo says.<\/p>\n
Graduating at the top of his Brock class, he was admitted directly into Notre Dame’s PhD program in Political Science, bypassing a master’s altogether.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a major achievement,\u201d says Bradshaw. \u201cNotre Dame is ranked as one of the Top 10 schools in the U.S. in political theory, which is Sam\u2019s area of specialization.\u201d<\/p>\n
Piccolo says he always considered feature stories the best part of reading the newspaper.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can see how there\u2019s political theory done in this sort of long-form journalism,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
In his final year at Brock, Piccolo combined two interests, venturing into the English Department to take Associate Professor Rob Alexander\u2019s creative non-fiction class. He says his award-winning essay was written in the style practised in that class.<\/p>\n
Piccolo looks back on his time at Brock as \u201ca terrific experience\u201d made possible by the University\u2019s seminar system and small classes that he says allow professors and students to get to know each other.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor all the people I know for whom university changed the course of their life, like it did for me, it\u2019s because they have professors who saw something in them that they didn\u2019t see in themselves,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s something I don\u2019t think can happen in a bigger school with the regularity that it can happen at Brock.\u201d<\/p>\n
Piccolo still hopes to do some non-academic writing when he can fit it in.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis place inspired me,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After graduating from Brock with a degree in International Political Economy, Sam Piccolo (BA \u201917) spent a year applying the lessons he\u2019d learned in class while picking up\u00a0more lessons that can only come from experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":59226,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[119,7,37,1,4,38],"tags":[8078,2371,30,4799,4247,42,8077,31,3427],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59225"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59225"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59227,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59225\/revisions\/59227"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}