I am looking at studying International Relations next year and was wondering what type of majors/ minors would be a good fit with it. Also, I am curious about what types of career possibilities would open up with an additional major/minor.
I would suggest a language, preferably one less commonly taught in American high schools (e.g. Mandarin, Arabic, Korean, etc.). I spent last summer as a NSLI-Y scholar in China and I am hoping to continue studying Mandarin in college as a minor (with International Relations as my major).
Second the language. And definitely try one of the “critical languages” such as Mandarin, Arabic, Russia, etc. It will open up a lot of opportunities in government.
Well, you don’t have to double-major or minor at all. You can just take classes in skills that are useful to you. But basically, a lot of things can fit with IR, depending on what’s at your school:
-I second the recommendation of a language. People who want to work internationally should know another language. Less commonly taught languages are very useful; you can even get scholarships to go abroad for a summer or semester to study then intensively. Look up the Critical Language Scholarships and the Boren Scholarships for information about that; those websites also both have lists of less commonly taught languages.
(I will add, though, that you should select a language you are actually interested in and a language in an area that you would like to work in. Spanish is a very common language, but it’s also useful because it’s so common - and a lot of international development work happens in Latin America. French is also quite common but if you want to do work in West Africa that could be a useful language to know. It makes little sense to learn Korean if you want to do international development work because South Korea is a developed nation and we don’t really have diplomatic relations with North Korea. However, if you are interested in international security, Korean would be an excellent language to know, as would Arabic. So basically before you think about the language, think about what you’re going to use it for.)
-If your college has it, statistics or economics could be a good minor, particularly if you get solid quantitative training. Some positions at international agencies can involve doing social science data analysis, or economic or policy analysis, and quant skills are useful in that domain.
The career opportunities that would be open to you depend on what the additional major is, and whether it’s a major or minor. I would say that minors don’t necessarily open up a lot of additional career opportunities unless you learn a completely different skill set - like if you minored in computer science and learned to program, there might be some places that want someone with international expertise that can program. Or if you know statistical analyses or economic/policy analysis there are lots of think tanks and NGOs that would hire you to to do that. Language skills, of course, can open a whole world of jobs that you are only eligible for if you are bilingual. So it really just depends. I would say that a double-major or minor in political science won’t really give you a ton of added value over a major in IR, unless you develop those quant skills.