Katie Waters is a current University of Michigan Master in Public Policy student hailing from Marquette, Michigan. She received her bachelor’s degree in sociology from Northern Michigan University under the tutelage of her mentor Dr. Alan McEvoy, finishing in 2021. After a gap year, she decided to execute a slight pivot toward a degree in public policy, while still tethering herself to her sociological imagination. She has worked as a teaching assistant for sociology and statistics classes and has led a team to complete research on the well-being and self-efficacy of college students during the first weeks of the pandemic lockdown. Fascinated in good ways and bad by cognition and what the brain allows people to believe, she also authored a literature review studying motivated reasoning and cognitive deviance. Various conspiracy theories were explored including those pertinent to the 2020 election, the January 6th insurrection, the anti-vax movement, and climate change denial, among others. This fall, she will be working and possibly traveling with a team of other public policy students under the US State Department to do work on the energy transition and battery storage solutions in the Caribbean region. She is now working at the Ecology Center studying how Michigan can leverage its national leadership in the auto industry to improve its statewide transport electrification efforts relative to other US states. When she finds time, she likes trying out new foods, listening to music, learning new languages, weightlifting, exploring new places, and reading.