So my intended major is IR, and I have narrowed down my top 2 to Brown and UChicago. Which, of the two, has the better program, internship opportunities, etc?
Tufts is also a good option. It has access to Fletcher school of Law and Diplomacy. One of the best in IR. ,
Tufts, William & Mary, Princeton, Georgetown and GW would all be better choices for IR. GW (though not as exciting a sticker for the back of your parent’s car as some of the others) is actually one of the best in terms of actual experience- if you work at it you can have internships pretty much every term (I know somebody who managed it every term except the first one, and still had a semester abroad, graduated a term early and walked straight into a great IR job this January).
UChicago is very good, though – it counts John Mearsheimer amongst its IR faculty. I am not a realist generally but reading Mearsheimer will make it difficult to say so.
Forgot to include Johns Hopkins
It’s true that collegemom’s list of schools are better known for IR, but it’s not as if a Brown degree will really be worse than Tufts for an IR career.
Just to clarify: I thank you all for your suggestions for IR schools, but I’m quite aware of them. I’m more interested in the difference in programs offered by just these two schools. If I come off as a bit curt, that was not my intention.
Well, UChic is changing their course from ‘International Studies’ to ‘Global Studies’, which keeps the required study away, but now it can be in the US (ie, NYC or DC) or abroad. IMO the new module descriptions are pretty woolly, but that may be b/c they are just getting started.
Neither is going to be particularly great for internships- you will be looking at summers, so it doesn’t really matter which you go to: you will get about the same amount of help getting the internships at most of the upper-tier colleges).
Really, for either you will be getting a generic IR major from a name-brand college- neither are where I would pick if I was seriously interested in IR. But, I know that IR is a popular major just now, so your interest may be more general.
Your next step after college will depend more on what you do over the summers than on which college you go to, so pick b/c you like the school not for the program. And those 2 schools are rather different environments
You think those two schools would offer a GENERIC education? just want to be sure
NO! of course not- those are both top-tier universities, and hardly generic. However, by the standards of IR majors at similar caliber universities, their IR majors are relatively generic. In other words, I think that you would get a similar caliber IR major at their peer colleges. If I had to pick I would put UChic’s program over Browns, but honestly, I don’t think that there would be much in it.
Ok thanks
FWIW, here’s one take on IR program quality (from Foreign Policy magazine):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_the_Ivory_Tower
Brown has the Watson Institute. Don’t know what Chicago has but I’ve known several Btown students who got amazing opportunities through Watson
Well honestly I’m not sure about Brown, but Chicago has quite a lot of IR offerings, even if it doesn’t have a major in IR (you’d choose Polisci instead). There’s the newly launched Pearson Institute, which was made possible by a $100 million gift, which will bring foreign policy leaders to campus on an annual basis and will study global conflicts; there’s the Institute of Politics, which brings lots of interesting speakers to campus (I saw the UN ambassador to Palestine, for example, Chance the Rapper, who talked about activism, and also Jon Huntsman, to name a few luminaries who have come to campus recently). Those are some of the main extracurricular things I can think of, but the major itself is pretty good, as we have people like Robert Pape and John Mearsheimer.
Doesn’t Chicago have a joint major in IR? Can anyone comment on the quality of that joint IR major?
You do realize that these two schools take very different attitudes toward general education requirements, right?
I don’t know how the same student could be interested in both UChicago and Brown—as an incoming Brown student, just the idea of the curriculum at Chicago would have made me balk.
That being said, you really can’t go wrong with either program. Neither is the first school I’d recommend for IR, but they’ll both obviously offer a great education and similar opportunities. Apply to both and see if you get in.
I’m someone who sees much value in a well rounded education, especially if one is to go into a field relating to IR. Essentially, I feel like I would do pretty much the same thing at both schools. I would take classes in the sciences that have value in IR if I were to go to Brown, and so on.
While the “open curriculum” at Brown may not encourage a “well-rounded” education, it certainly does not preclude it.
Given that IR is an interdisciplinary major, the major requirements tend to overlap with many of the distribution requirements at other schools so the type of curriculum becomes less of a differentiator between schools.