@AppAnxiety From the perspective of raw rankings, Stanford’s political science department is #2 (Harvard’s is #1 and Yale’s is #4). The social science in which Stanford really shines is psychology, as the department has been ranked #1 for quite some time. But having said that, all of the other posters are correct in saying that the overall quality of the social science departments at these three universities is comparable.
From the standpoint of academic opportunities in the social sciences, each of these schools will give you way more opportunities than you can take advantage of.
To address one of your concerns, there is certainly no lack of opportunities in the social sciences at Stanford. Campus is home to the Hoover Institution (http://www.hoover.org/), which is one of the country’s leading policy think tanks. Cody Rice is a fellow at the Institution as well as a professor at the University, and she teaches a class during Winter Quarter. Other fellows include George Shultz (Secretary of State under Reagan), whom I met at a Hoover dinner to which some undergraduates were invited. The Hoover Institution has a program for undergrads interested in IR called the National Security Affairs Mentorship Program (https://www.facebook.com/StanfordInternationalRelationsProgram/posts/650419541712123). When President Obama came to Stanford for the White House Cybersecurity Summit in February, 10 undergraduates met with him for a roundtable discussion (http://www.stanforddaily.com/2015/02/13/obama-meets-with-10-unsuspecting-students-for-hourlong-roundtable/). Most of the students in this group came from the Mentorship Program. Outside of Hoover, Stanford is also home to the Center for International Security and Cooperation (http://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/), which has an undergraduate honors program in which students do research with a CISAC fellow and write a senior thesis. I should also add that Mitt Romney came to one of my political science classes (most of us took individual pictures with him), and I took a political science class taught by the chief advisor to his campaign. Stanford also has the Bing Stanford in Washington Program (https://siw.stanford.edu/) for juniors. While in this program, students spend a quarter in DC, where they have an internship during the day and take classes at night. Justice Breyer and Senator Cory Booker (both Stanford grads) have dropped by the Stanford House in Washington to talk to students, with Breyer reportedly giving last year’s group his personal email address. So, in short, you will not be low on opportunities as a social science student at Stanford. If you don’t get enough of polisci/IR in the classroom, you could even join Stanford in Government (https://sig.stanford.edu/) as an extracurricular activity.
Having said all of this, though, Stanford definitely does “feel” like an engineering/Silicon Valley feeder school no matter who you are and what you study. Many more of your classmates will be studying engineering than Political Science, and the fact that so many Stanford students (somewhere around 30%, I think) major in the School of Engineering simply affects the overall “feel” of the place. Just like (and I can’t speak to this personally since I don’t go to UPenn) UPenn feels like a finance school since Wharton is such a big part of it. The bottom line is that you will know a lot of engineering kids, and many of them will spend their summers at Google, Facebook, Palantir, etc. And, yes, many of the career fairs will cater to these kids (particularly to CS kids) since those are the people who will make the most money for corporations. Now, since you want to do PoliSci or IR, you probably want to go to graduate school, and you’ve already said that you don’t want to have a pre-professional undergraduate experience, so you won’t even be at these career fairs in the first place. But they will exist at Stanford (and at Harvard and at Yale, except those may focus less on tech and more on finance). I should also add that CS enrollment numbers are on the rise at both Harvard (CS50 is the most popular class and CS is the fastest-growing concentration) and Yale (which just adopted Harvard’s CS50), so my gut tells me that you will have fewer peers in PoliSci and in IR relative to years past no matter where you go. Also, when you hear that Harvard students get more government jobs, you should consider that more Harvard students want government jobs than Stanford students, most of whom want to work in tech and engineering. I think that that accounts for most of the difference. To be clear, I do not think that any government doors will close for you just because you have a Stanford PoliSci degree and not a Harvard government degree.
A few nuanced points:
- Harvard does not have an International Relations concentration. You could concentration in Government and then specialize in IR, but it doesn’t have a concentration named IR. Stanford does have an interdisciplinary IR major that combines political science, economics, and a foreign language. You can look at this major’s requirements here:
http://exploredegrees.stanford.edu/schoolofhumanitiesandsciences/internationalrelations/#bachelortext
- I’ve heard that double-majoring (which you say you want to do) is far less common (and perhaps more difficult thanks to the semester system) at Harvard and Yale relative to Stanford. I do know of many Harvard students who do a primary concentration (i.e., major) and a secondary concentration (i.e., minor), but that isn’t the same as a double major. Double majoring isn’t terribly common at Stanford either (primarily because some of Stanford’s most popular majors like CS make it hard to double major since the major itself requires so many classes), but doubling in PoliSci and IR would definitely be doable.
Let me know if you have any questions.
