I’m a Political Science major at the University at Buffalo. I chose the major because I had been thinking about law school (not really sure yet), and I am interested in ethics, law, psychology, government, etc (all in the major).
HOWEVER, I am constantly being told by my peers that my major=no job.
Are they right? If I don’t go to graduate school, or law school am I toast?
I’m really not sure what I want to do, so any realistic jobs that a Polysci major can apply for would be cool.
I have nothing against going to graduate school, but I’m just not sure what I want to do yet. (AND IM A JUNIOR AHHHH!)
Hey, Sean. UB 2004 grad here, with a dual in PoliSci and Philosophy. (Try to get something in with Eagles, Lamb and Campbell. They’re gold. If you can grab Yu for one of his ethics courses over in the PHI dept, run, don’t walk, to register for it.)
I’m in law school now, so you can see where I went with it. To be honest, I’m not sure what I’d be doing if I didn’t go on for some sort of further schooling. Most of the jobs that PoliSci applies directly to - consulting, eg - really do require a higher-level degree, or at least that’s the impression that I get.
Of course, that assumes you want your degree to apply directly to your job. You can really take any job and spin a strong undergrad performance into an appropriate hazing for the real world.
I’m no expert, but I’d say to ask yourself this: If you’re not going to finish a PoliSci degree, do you really have a burning desire to get into a different field? Do you envision yourself doing a job that strongly involves the concepts taught in another major? If not, finish doing what excites you mentally and take it from there.
I doubled majored in Political Science and Economics. I have noticed that some interviewers have the “Poli Sci=Why Try?” attitude. Political Science, along with some other social sciences, is considered a “joke” major at SOME schools. Unfortunately, some interviewers will assume since it was a joke at their school, you spent 4 years partying at your school.
I don’t regret majoring in Political Science and Economics. I dedided not to go to law school after I graduated. I do wish I would have gotten my teaching certificate back then, however.
I majored in Political Science because I’d planned to go to law school. I didn’t. While I make a very nice living now in the IT field, I certainly don’t need a degree in Political Science to do it.
The thing about Polysci or international relations is IMHO basically common sense. I started out that way and switched to economics (and Chinese). I could have easily coasted through undergrad with a high GPA if I had done PolySci. To me it was so simple and obvious, why spend 4 years studying it. So, I opted for something more challenging.
If I could do it over again, I probably would have been an accounting major.
Depends what you want to do. I was an international relations major in college, which is usually a part of most poli sci departments. I have a great job working in foreign policy.
But a poli sci degree, like a history degree, or an English degree, or the vast majority of other liberal arts-type degrees, don’t naturally lead into a single career track. However, most good white collar jobs you come across, with the exception of those involving hard sciences or engineering, simply expect their applicants to have a college degree in a relevant field – which is a pretty flexible requirement. My view is that poli sci is, for the most part, as good as any other degree one might choose to pursue, depending on one’s goal.
I firmly believe that success with one’s studies is more important than what field one chooses to pursue. The obvious exceptions are fields which require intensive study in sciences, like if you plan to pursue a medical degree or work in high energy physics. If law school really is in your range of thinking, you’ll find an abundance of poli sci majors there, too.
Oh, and don’t forget this hard and real fact: not a single employer in the world will care what field your BA was in seven years after you graduate.
I have a political science and I value it. Just me. My employers could care less. I knew when I was getting it that I was going on to library school, so I did something fun with my undergrad. You can go to law school on any degree, so there’s no reason to tie yourself to political science only for that reason.
As Ravenman says, a liberal arts degree serves the same function as a high school diploma, on a slightly higher scale. It represents that you know enough about life, science, culture, and critical thinking to be a functional adult at a white collar job. If you know what you want to do, the degree is immaterial. If you don’t know what you want to do, the degree won’t help you decide.
I’m at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City. It’s a branch of the Yeshiva University system, and I’ll try not to gush too much about it although I’m loving it so far. I just wrote my first law school exam today, so pending the grade I can’t really tell you how much the political science helped me.
Absolutely, although you’ll find comparably weak journal articles and papers like you’ll find anywhere. Often, political science articles will use conditions to conduct a “natural experiment” and have to retrofit the methodology to work with it by, say, evaluating the relative liberalism versus conservatism in legislation passed by a given legislature; in other cases, they work off of survey data. Articles are often accompanied by graphs and tables representing numerical translations of the data; some teachers even subject their students to it. There are quite rigorous methodological standards, assuming you want your article to be published without being torn to shreds. If you’re interested, hit a local library and look at some of the Political Science journals for some examples.
Poli Sci major here. My first job was as the City Clerk of a small municipality. Then I went to law school, dropped out, got married and became a mom. Now I’m an administrative assistant in Marketing for a Fortune 50 company.
Did my degree help me? Not directly. But when I compete against other people, I have an edge over people who don’t have a degree or who have crappy g.p.a.'s. And my starting salary is adjusted because I have that piece of paper.
What do you do if you have an international relations degree (ie. a BA in poli. sci.) but aren’t a citizen? I’m not eligible for a State Department job, as far as I can tell…
I’m not the best career counselor, but international consulting is a large and expanding business. For example, company A wants to move into Country X, but doesn’t know a lot about local laws, customs, and safety. It hired consultants that establish contacts in that country to gather this sort of information. The Economist Intelligence Unit (www.eiu.com) is a well-known source of some of this kind of information. Also, there is Stratfor, (www.stratfor.com) which is as close to a private intelligence agency as there is anywhere around. Both are pretty exciting careers that are somewhat comparable to a career in the foreign service.
There’s also thinktanks, magazines, newspapers, banks, insurance companies, manufacturers, and others who look for people with international experience for various positions. Of course, you could always work for the foeign service of your home country, too.
But, again, they do not hire people because they have an IR degree. What you’ve done in college is ten times more important than the words on your diploma. If you, with extensive coursework in international relations, are competing with a philosophy major who did a year abroad and can speak Chinese, you’re not getting the job.
I assume you are studying a language, right? A hard one?
I received a degree with a double major in political science and history – two majors that would seem to have little relevance in the job world. However, I’ve never had a problem getting a job. In fact, I had a job waiting for me when I graduated. Of course, it’s not as if I got that job based on my degree. Hell, I would have had that job if I’d majored in biology, English, physics, etc. As someone stated above, for most jobs it doesn’t really matter what your degree is in. Employers simply want a college graduate. In some instances this isn’t true, like if you want to be an accountant or a NASA engineer, but for most jobs I think it is.
Don’t let your friends BS you. If they are saying you can’t get a job with a poli-sci degree, then they are simply showing their ignorance. You really shouldn’t take advice from ignorant people.
