In his four years at the University of Notre Dame, Cade Czarnecki ’26 has majored in political science and economics, studied for a semester each in Washington, D.C., and Greece, served as president of the multi-partisan BridgeND club, earned a spot as an inaugural undergraduate fellow with the Notre Dame Democracy Initiative, and worked as a research operations analyst for the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO).
And if that weren’t enough, he’s also fast. Czarnecki won the 2026 Holy Half Marathon with a time of 1:16:30.
“Having the latitude to do so much in a short period of time while still feeling that I am committing myself to these efforts is something uniquely Notre Dame,” Czarnecki said.
The graduating senior from Cincinnati says his College of Arts & Letters education has given him the space and support to pursue all of these passions and more, both in and outside of the classroom.
As an admissions tour guide, Czarnecki said prospective students and families often ask how he manages to balance so many endeavors.
“I credit Arts and Letters with giving me the flexibility within the official program of study to really pursue the things I care about,” he said. “One of the cool things about Notre Dame, and Arts and Letters specifically, is how many students do so many things.”
Just four years ago, Czarnecki was on the other side of a campus tour as an admitted student. Community and student club involvement ended up being the deciding factor in Czarnecki choosing Notre Dame, and it became a hallmark of his experience.
As a freshman, Czarnecki joined BridgeND, a chapter of a national student-led organization, which has been his most significant extracurricular activity. He served as president in his junior year and then as senior advisor.
“The whole point of the club is to foster political conversation across party lines,” he said. “To bring students of different affiliations to a room, to sit down together, and to afford legitimacy to the beliefs of their peers through meaningful conversations.”
The club has about 30 active members and hosts campus-wide events, such as a debate between College Democrats and College Republicans. Czarnecki has also served in student government all four years, spending his later years working in sustainability.
And as a sophomore, Czarnecki participated in the Notre Dame Washington Program, where he worked at the U.S. Department of Commerce, helping coordinate policy memos for the Secretary of Commerce. The following year, he spent the fall semester in Greece and was amazed by its rich historical and cultural traditions, especially as the birthplace of democracy.
His interest in politics and government stems from his upbringing in Ohio, which was a presidential swing state for most of his formative years. By the time he was on the cusp of voting age in 2020, though, his home state turned solidly red, which drove his curiosity to study political science in college.
These shifting political dynamics in Ohio and nationwide also informed Czarnecki’s senior thesis in economics, “Granting an Edge: The Employment Effects of Politically Driven Federal Dollars,” which examines how disproportionate federal government project grant spending in presidential battleground states influences employment in those places.
“It’s established in economics literature that swing states — states of more electoral importance — get disproportionately more federal project grant dollars,” he said. “And in the end, I find that a 10% increase in such discretionary funding, given specifically to states because of their electoral significance, results in about a 7% increase in employment.”
The project, Czarnecki said, tied together his economics and political science majors, each of which nourishes a different aspect of his academic interests.
“Political science is really what’s interesting to me; it’s the conversations I like to have. It’s the theory that’s interesting,” he said. “But it lacks a definitive tool by which to actually analyze and have these conversations. I think that’s where economics complements it nicely — it helps understand the world around you, it is a way of quantifying what you observe, of bringing some kind of metric or comparison into those conversations.”
Czarnecki received funding from the University’s Democracy Initiative for his thesis and was able to take advantage of his time last summer while working with LEO to get a head start on the project, by meeting periodically with his thesis advisor, economics professor and LEO co-founder James Sullivan.
As a research operations analyst with LEO, Czarnecki conducted statistical analyses across several projects, ranging from evaluating the impact of a girls’ empowerment initiative in Indianapolis public schools to studying the effects of different support methods at the Boys and Girls Clubs of the Northern Indiana Corridor.
Czarnecki was also a part of the inaugural cohort of Democracy Fellows, during which he workshopped research ideas with peers during a weekly class and had the opportunity to meet with former Department of Justice prosecutors.
After graduation, Czarnecki will start his career as an economic consulting analyst at Chicago-based Compass Lexecon, the leading competition and antitrust economic consulting firm.
“Economic consulting is very different than your typical consulting that a lot of business students go into,” he said. “It’s driven by litigation.”
For instance, if two companies try to merge, the government can sue them, alleging anti-competitive or monopolistic practices or arguing that the merger would raise prices on consumers or give the merged entity an outsized market share. In that case, attorneys hire economic consultants to help build the quantitative evidence for their case.
“The role I’m going to be in is one where we’re doing economic modeling to show, in the world in which these two companies merge, do prices in fact go up for consumers? And so we’ll actually be taking the data, building models, and creating quantitative evidence for these lawsuits,” he said.
Czarnecki said he eventually wants to continue this sort of work as an attorney specializing in mergers and acquisitions and competition law. But before law school, his Notre Dame experience inspired him to first follow his passions.
“I came into college thinking I would probably go straight through undergrad and go to law school immediately after,” he said. “And at some point, it became clear to me that I have these other interests that Notre Dame has allowed me to explore and encouraged me to dig into.”
