Greetings College Confidential,
As the title indicates, i am wondering what quantitative classes and skills the top political science programs in the country are looking for. Presently, I am a Sophomore in undergrad studying Political Science and Finance. I’ve decided I want to go for a masters or possibly a PHD and from looking at Princeton, Georgetown and a few other sites, they’re looking for quantitative skills relating to statistics and math in addition to political science.
For anyone who is familiar with these schools or similar programs, how in-depth are they wanting my quantitative background to be? I’ve taken intro level economics and statistics courses, and I have four semesters left to flesh these out more if need be. What would you all recommend?
I don’t know the field, but I had a great polisci professor in undergrad, and I think I saw a paper of his where he definitely used calculus. I’d recommend at least a year of calculus, plus probability and stats obviously. Calculus 3 and linear algebra would be beneficial. If you want to go all out, then differential equations, and real (and complex?) analysis could be good I suppose.
I’ve completed a business calculus course, although i’m not sure if they would prefer the more mathematical side.
Can very good quantitative GRE scores substitute a lack of classes?
No idea. They probably know the quant GRE is a joke and there’s no way you’ll be prepared for the Math subject exam (which would demonstrate mastery). I TAed a business calc class once, and it was super lame. It involved no trig or anything, it was basically just integrating polynomials and stuff like 1/x and e^x over and over again.
I’m not in political science but I am in another quantitative social science.
More is always better, of course. However, my educated hunch is that the vast majority of political science programs are NOT expecting you to have advanced mathematical skills, or even much knowledge of calculus. Having taken 1-3 semesters of calculus, linear algebra, and some calculus-based statistics would be HELPFUL, of course, but really the background they’ll be looking for is in statistics taught from an algebraic perspective, usually within a department of political science. However, more will make you not only more competitive, but will make you better able to work on a variety of projects in graduate school AND will make you more marketable post-graduation.
Given that you have four semesters level I echo @mathandcs’s recommendation - a year of calculus, a semester of linear algebra, and a semester or two of probability and statistics (in the math department). If you’ve already taken business calculus, you might be able to take a cal II class depending on how good the calculus class was. If you have at least that foundational knowledge, you can always take more classes in graduate school - and it sets you up for doing more advanced work (like taking higher level classes in the statistics department at your PhD program, or getting a concurrent MA in statistics, which is an option at many universities).
Just to put it out there: I wouldn’t skip ahead to calc 2 if the extent of biz calc was differentiating polynomials and exponentials, etc. It’s really important to be comfortable with the mean value theorem (and Rolle’s), extreme value theorem, some L’Hopital’s rule too (including with trig functions). My guess is stuff like MVT is more important to polisci than knowing how to differentiate 5xe^x + 4x^3. Maybe math in polisci graduate research would even involve some epsilons and deltas, who knows. In any case, I recommend a course sequence that uses Stewart’s Early Transcendentals.
Sometimes probability requires Calculus 3 first, although usually not. It’s not really hard for the instructor to explain what a double integral is when doing joint distributions, so the hard stuff from Calc III (like Stoke’s Theorem) wouldn’t make an appearance in a probability class (well, I guess that’s not completely out of the question…)
Hi juillet and mathandcs,
I appreciate the replies so far. My Business Calculus class did cover the mean value theorem, extreme value theorem and L’Hopitals rule, the professor was very good. I’ll look into fitting in higher level statistics and economics classes into my schedule.
How likely do you think that some of the upper level business classes will help? My business school, Cox at Southern Methodist University, offers electives on international trade, international finance and financial institutions which have a very heavy statistics base. I’ll see if I can locate the syllabi for these classe and look into detail on them.
Well, the vast majority of social scientists don’t need super-advanced theoretical statistics to do their work. If you’re planning to develop statistical methods in political science and/or interested in creating and tweaking models in the field, then perhaps, yes. AND a greater foundation is always better if there’s even a chance you might want a non-academic job, because more and more non-academic jobs value people with strong quantitative skills.
But if your main goal is doing political science research and simply applying advanced statistical methods in it, you need a grasp but it’s not that important for you to have advanced mathematical knowledge. I have two semesters of calculus and linear algebra, and statistical coursework that is mostly non-calculus-based through graduate school, and I’m considered more statistically advanced in my field (psychology, excepting quantitative psychologists) - and that’s because I had a specific interest in learning the more advanced methods and thinking about them somewhat theoretically. Most of even the most successful psychologists in my field don’t have a calculus background at all (again, with the exception of quantitative psychologists, who develop new methods - and even then, some of them don’t take calc until grad school!)
I’d suspect that the same is true in political science. Basically, you need to know enough to do the work you want to do. Since you’re a sophomore, I think it’s worthwhile to ask some of your professors/advisors what they think - how much math they think you should take to be competitive for PhD programs. Get a variety of opinions from people within your field and make your decisions based upon that.
Unless you are interested in some mix of political science and business, I don’t know how useful the business classes would be. If the classes are sort of more a proxy for you learning statistics - aka, they teach the statistics using business and finance examples - then they could be a good idea, although you’d have to explain that in a statement noting that you do have the stats background. But a regular stats background is probably more appealing.