Teaching

More thoughts on Undergraduate education more generally

My courses are interactive because students must engage the material directly. During lectures, I have an open question policy; students can always interrupt me, and I can always ask them questions. Further, students must not only be free to express themselves, but they also must have their predispositions challenged. College age is a formative time for political opinions to be developed and hence students must be allowed to verbalize and address their own contradictions and engage in a safe dialogue with their classmates about controversial topics. In order to facilitate such interactivity, a professor must be able to establish authority and objectivity, so that the students trust the professor’s role and expertise to moderate.

Second, classes have to be exciting. Many of our undergraduates today come to us with heavy levels of nihilism and skepticism. These instincts can sometimes creep over into any curriculum if the student’s interest is not held. Therefore, one of the roles of the professor is to keep the material exciting. I am a firm believer that the vivaciousness and energy that a professor brings to the classroom translates into the attentiveness of students. Brilliance will be lost on the masses if they are not listening. My evaluation reports consistently reinforce this view, as students comment on my passion and energy in the classroom, which I consciously do to hold student interest and get them excited about political science.

The final principle for undergraduate education that I follow is organization. Students, I have found, are fixated, perhaps too much on the concept of fairness. If they feel as though they are not being treated equitably in the classroom, then they sometimes lose sight of the forest for the trees and disengage from their courses. The easiest way to deal with this is to have very detailed and anticipatory procedures for students for whom issues or problems may arise. I feel very strongly that the syllabus is a contract between teacher and pupil, and is something that can help give students a very early sense of how courses are conducted, allowing them to turn their attention to course materials instead of untangling due dates, formatting and procedures.”

Is a Political Science Major a good investment?

Over the years, a common question that arises from students, but even more often from their parents is the following: “What do I do with a political science major?” The question is often heavily laden with a judgment that a social science major, and particularly political science, is a value laden and purely perfunctory academic pursuit (i.e. skeptical parents often use the phrases “waste of time” and “not worth it.”) This sentiment reflects the struggle of a discipline whose methodology of study is vast and whose subject area arouses strong sentiments in people. It also reflects a misunderstanding of what political scientists do.

Political scientists are primarily concerned with generating and testing generalizable theories about human interactions, specifically in the political arena. Because of this, much of what students learn in political science is a variety of methods for understanding human behavior, theorizing about it, rigorously analyzing data, and speaking and writing about these ideas clearly and concisely. This produces an extremely exportable skill set to a variety of career paths; political science students learn to be versatile. Political Science Majors have gone to work for polling firms in DC, national and local elected officials, and large companies like Microsoft. Recent students with whom I have worked personally have gone to pursue doctoral study at places like Oxford and University of California, San Diego, as well as Master’s study at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

To offer some hard data to the worth of the Political Science Major, PayScale.com releases data on the average earning potential of recent college graduates. Political Science majors make on average $43,800 as a starting wage just out of college and on average $89,000 by mid-career. This places Political Science as the major with the second highest earning potential among the social sciences, only behind Economics. The mid-career number puts Political Science in the top 30% of All Majors in terms of earning potential, including the 14 majors in PayScale’s database. The cohort of majors that Political Science majors have similar mid-career earning potential to (+/- $2000) includes Network Engineering, Industrial Technology, Biotechnology, Marketing, GIS & Spatial Analysis, Geology, Accounting, and Biological Sciences.