<p>i love UPenn, but you don't hear a lot about their political science and/or international relations departments (mostly business management and the like)... can anybody enlighten me on the strength of the academics in this area?</p>
<p>IR isn't a department, it's a program, composed of professors and courses from History, Economics and Political Science. I'm an IR major and I would say its a solid program that has good placement of students in the Buisness world, Government world and Academic world.</p>
<p>Political Science has some really great professors who do some interesting things - such as Brendan O'Leary who helped write the Iraqi Constitution. As a major it's pretty easy to breeze through - its structured so that you could just take 12 easy classes - so you need to be sure to challenge yourself with seminars and/or a thesis.</p>
<p>What do you mean "you don't hear"? do u associate the decency of a school's education with the level of "hearing" you get about it? You only "hear" about HYPSM and never "hear" about UPenn, and it's the #5 university in the country. Penn international relations and political science depts. are (from what I know) very good and I don't think there are many schools in the country that are better than Penn in these fields. you gotta do some research on your own to know for sure</p>
<p>as a international relations god myself,</p>
<p>Penn's history department is superb top of the line. Poly sci has traditionally been less excellent but is gaining much ground. Some top professors included Goldstein, Granieiri, Tierney(go borrowed profs from Swat!), julia lynch, you get the point. And the IR Econ they teach here is great (micro, macro, wharton classes, etc).</p>
<p>Penn isn't your average pedigree IR program. It has a special mix of really gifted mentors, for unique people who want to take a unique path with IR</p>
<p>RFMIT has a very good point there - what you hear as a highschool student is not at all an accurate reflection of a department's reputation among academics. </p>
<p>This goes to anyone with a real interest in their education: pick up a copy of the academic journals in your field. Look at the names published, and look at the citations in the articles. Look up the schools often published, and look up the faculty often published - these are the metrics that schools use to rank up each other, and that USNEWS uses (indirectly, at least). It's going to take some work to find the journals and identify the key people, but it's an investment in your future as an academic.</p>
<p>but for undergraduate its that not important. </p>
<p>Like would you rather go to Yale or JHU for ugrad, if you want to go into IR? I'd say you should just go to yale even though jhu has a much better IR program cuz your ugrad education (aka sampling various disciplines and garnering your critical thinking skills) will be stronger that way. </p>
<p>and you can specialize at jhu</p>
<p>and then you can say "I went to yale" and get mad bitties.</p>
<p>McDougall won a Pulitzer prize. Waldron is a 'blue team' commando. Amyx is good at whatever she does...so good that Stanford tried to lure her away (but she is ours! muahaha!) The list goes on.</p>