What is Public and International Affairs?
What is it like being a WWS major?
What are common misconceptions about WWS majors?
What kind of internships and international experiences have majors had?
How will WWS majors save the world?
Why would anyone want to date a WWS major?
What is Public and International Affairs?
Public and International Affairs is a very broad discipline that encompasses both domestic and international policy. The Woodrow Wilson School takes a multidisciplinary approach to analyzing a variety of problems, drawing on five main departments: Politics, Economics, History, Sociology and Psychology.
One advantage to WWS is that you can give yourself an interdisciplinary background more easily than in other majors; due to its requirements for courses in ECO, HIS, POL, PSY and/or SOC, you can focus on a region (Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, etc.) or topic (environmental science, engineering, health, etc.) and understand it from different points of view. This type of education is useful in many work environments because you'll be able to bridge the social scientists, engineers, and economists—you'll be able to understand all their arguments and synthesize them. Nevertheless, because it gives you more freedom in your choices of what to take, you'll need to careful in your choice of classes to make sure that you get enough depth or expertise in a particular subject area so that you can move into a job in your field of study.
What is it like being a WWS major?
As any other department, WWS has its defining characteristics. In particular, you take two task forces during your junior year in WWS, one each semester. The task force is generally comprised of 8 to 10 students who have class one night per week on a given topic (though there has been movement towards policy conferences on select topics, which can have up to 15 students). Before each semester, you put down your first, second, and third choices for a task force topic, but most people generally end up with their first choice. For those who do not receive their first choice in the fall, they are given priority for spring semester. The early weeks of the task force are spent becoming familiar with your topic and then you soon start delving into policy questions. Each task force differs in how one selects a JP topic, but generally you have some flexibility within the scope of your task force's topic.
An important difference about a WWS JP is that it is not an academic paper, in the traditional sense--it is a policy paper! The task force is set up in such a way that the conclusions of your JP will generally be recommendations to your "client" or audience. The task force as a whole will make a formal presentation to the client, which can range from a county's board of education to the state department in Washington, DC.
However, an important difference about WWS is that one of your JPs often does not serve as a basis for your senior thesis, as is the case in many other departments. The senior thesis is an academic paper first and foremost, with an important policy component.
The nice thing about being in WWS is that it does have a strong emphasis on multidisciplinary learning. However, it is important to note that there are several course requirements (you cannot just take whatever 8 upper level classes in ECO, HIS, POL, PSY and/or SOC). There is one core course requirement: WWS 300 Democracy. In addition, there is an ethics requirement, which several courses can fulfill, and a quantitative methods class. Apart from those, the requirements are to pick a "mini-concentration" in one of the five departments, and then you must also take one upper level course in each of the other departments (apart from SOC and PSY, which count together for this instance). And finally, you must take at least three WWS classes, but don't worry about this long list because many interesting classes are cross-listed, so often you're receiving two types of credit (e.g. an upper-level WWS /ECO course may count both as a WWS course as well as an upper level ECO)!
What are common misconceptions about WWS majors?
1. Unfortunately, some students have the notion that all Woodrow Wilson School majors are "tools," that they choose the major specifically because it is selective in order to give them a leg up for finance, consulting, or law school, and have little or no interest in developing their attitudes toward public policy and eventually getting a job in the public sector. While some students do end up in those type of jobs or in law school, some Woodrow Wilson School students do go into public service, and quite a few spend the summer before their senior year in government or in closely related non-profits, often in Washington, DC. The Woodrow Wilson School pays for its majors to have this experience in the summer before senior year, and it is telling that many students have chosen this route even though they could have earned more at a finance or consulting internship. Even many who go to law school, such as the Dean of the school Anne-Marie Slaughter, eventually find their way back to public service. With the upcoming retirement of a large portion of an aging federal workforce, expect more Woodrow Wilson School majors to enter public service.
2. The lawsuit against the school from the Robertson family actually has nothing to do with the undergraduate program. The Robertson family is mad because they claim that their money was designed to turn Master's MPA students into public servants, and some went into the private sector.
What kind of internships and international experiences have majors had?
WWS is very supportive of study abroad. Each year, eight different programs are offered (four in the fall, four in the spring), with locations ranging from Oxfod, Paris, Budapest, and Hong Kong in the fall to Cape Town, Cairo, and Santiago in the spring. WWS has partnered with a specific university in each city, making both applying to the programs and, upon a student's return, credit transfer very easy processes. Students generally only study abroad for one semester, as the department strongly prefers that students write at least one of their JPs at Princeton. Every year, as soon as the sophomore class is admitted, there is a study abroad information session.
Various study abroad experiences can be really different: as the lone WWS student studying abroad in Santiago, Chile, I feel like I should comment on my WWS study abroad experience. Because I was the only student at that site, I wrote a JP rather than participating in a task force; although it was much more difficult at the time (because I didn't have a class experience to guide me through the process, because of the availability of resources, because my JP advisor was at the Universidad de Chile while I had all my classes at La Católica, etc.), in retrospect, it has prepared me better for the independent research I'll be doing on my thesis. It also meant that I had more freedom in choosing what to write about. On another note, although WWS highly encourages you to study abroad, I found that once I was out of sight, I was also out of mind; no one from WWS inquired about my study abroad experience until after the semester ended.
As another student who recently studied abroad in Oxford, I had a different experience than the previous student. We did have a task force of 11 students with an Oxford professor who also ensured to bring other well-respected academics from Europe for guest lectures. However, the task force experience differed from task forces at Princeton in that we did not have a "senior commissioner" to guide or write the final report. Instead, the task force elects two (or in our case three) leaders to step into the role that the senior commissioner traditionally fills. Furthermore, both Dean Scovronick and Dean Kanach came to visit over fall break and held a meeting to elicit feedback on the program and our experience.
In other respects, WWS is very supportive of international experiences, particularly in terms of thesis funding. WWS has generous thesis funding, so if you want to do research abroad, you can do so perhaps more easily in WWS than in other departments.
How will WWS majors save the world?
The question should be a tautology: the point of public service is to save the world. How else will problems such as global warming, expensive health care, AIDS, human rights abuses, (insert pet issue here) be solved if not for sound public policy?
Why would anyone want to date a WWS major?
Seriously: The application system, even though it may not be perfect, does tend to choose intelligent, well-spoken students. Some students complain about a "Princeton Bubble" in which one loses sight of issues outside of campus, and many Woodrow Wilson School students do an excellent job of trying to pop the bubble, so they can be quite worldly. Of course, this is a question about dating, not finding a professor, and most Woodrow Wilson School student find (or make) time to go out to the Street or meet up with friends. The work, unlike that for an engineer, does not need to consume one's entire life, although it can and by senior year doing a thesis, it almost certainly will.
