Woodrow Wilson School

mzhang23
Wed, 30 Aug 2006 22:16:35 +0000

I’ll just cut past all the propaganda and dick-measuring and get straight to the point.

The WWS program at Princeton is very good if you take advantage of its strong points. As PtonGrad2000 pointed out, the WWS major offers policy task forces during an undergraduate’s junior year - something that no other concentration does.

This year I will be participating in a policy task force on National Security and Iraq. The professor leading this has had extensive real-life experience with national security issues and has chaired positions on the 9/11 commission ad well as worked within the State Department.

After talking to a student who had him last year, I’ve come to see why WWS is special. Instead of just having students write a junior paper with support from a professor, instead up to 10 students talk with him in weekly seminars. Students than select aspects of the topic to write a policy paper. With this specific professor, he invites top experts in their fields at the end of the year to grill students on their policy recommendations, essentially simulating a Congressional hearing.

In another task force last year, a professor took his students down to Langley, VA, where they met CIA director George Tenet and gave presentations on their policy papers to top CIA officials.

One of the most famous task forces involved a professor taking his students into the Congo to interview actual warlords. The students then wrote policy papers examining human rights and international law.

As an actual undergraduate concentration, you’ll notice certain things about the Wilson School. First, Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter cares intensely about the undergraduate program. She knows the undergraduate majors, teaches a freshman seminar, and tries very hard to make sure the undergraduate program runs smoothly. She’s no doubt concerned with the Robertson feud, which is why Princeton is starting up a new scholarship program next fall intending to put more students in the public service field. Will you find the same at Harvard? I don’t know, but to me it’s unlikely that the dean of a grad school is this involved in the undergraduate program at Harvard.

Looking at departamental rankings says crap about which departments are actually better. As far as I know, anything in the top 10 is good. If you’re applying to graduate school, it’s probably better to see the selection of professors that your school offers, since you may want to work with a certain professor who is an expert in a certain field.

I understand Harvard allows their students to become invovled in the Kennedy school, but I don’t think the level of involvement extends to anything the WWS undergraduate program offers. Of course, WWS definitely has its own weaknesses. I find that the course requirements tend to be a bit lax, which means that students who complete only the mininum requirements may come out learning less than most people would expect. Tom Christensen, a famous China scholar, is currently taking two years off to work in the State Department, which deprives potential China-oriented senior theses of a very good advisor until he returns.

However, examining US news rankings means nothing. The only true comparison you get will be from someone who has done an MPA at both the Kennedy and the Wilson School - and you won’t find that. Nor will you find an undergrad who has “participated” in Kennedy school programs and majored in the Wilson School as well.

As far as I’m concerned, they’re both good, but you’ll find nothing else like a policy task force.