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I need some honest opinions. I graduated in Political Science with top marks, but now that I’m getting closer to actually applying for jobs/internships in the fields I’m interested in, I’m realizing how much I’ve forgotten.

I have developed some practical skills through some volunteering experiences and other previous jobs, but when it comes to the theory I studied at university, sometimes it feels like there’s a black hole in my head. I might recognize a concept if I see it, but if I had to actively use it in a professional situation, I’m scared I wouldn’t be able to.

I also haven’t kept myself updated enough on the areas I’m most interested in. There’s just SO much to know — international relations, human rights, international law, development, geopolitics, current affairs, institutions, conflicts, etc. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed just thinking about how much I’m supposed to know, and then I end up not studying anything.

The problem is that I’ve recently started getting actual opportunities, and instead of being excited, I’m scared I’m going to make a fool of myself. I keep thinking: “What if they realize I’m not as knowledgeable as they think I am?” It’s also making me hesitate to apply for positions because I feel like other candidates are much more informed and educated than I am.

So, for those of you who graduated did you also feel like you forgot most of what you studied when you entered the job market? How much did you actually remember? And how did you deal with the feeling that you weren’t “educated enough” for the jobs you were applying for?

I’d really appreciate some honest perspectives.

Hey, I need those two textbooks for my classes, but I can't seem to find them anywhere online (searched all the common and uncommon websites). If you could help me out, have a copy that you can share, or know where I can get them, that would be great.

1) Mark Boyer, Natalie Hudson and Michael Butler, Global Politics: Applying Theory to a Complex World, 2nd Ed., (Oxford University Press, 2024)

2) Political Research: Methods and Practical Skills - 4th ed 2025

Any help will be greatly appreciated, thanks!

I hope this is the right place for this, I did read the rules and it doesn't seem like this would break any rules. I don't want attacks on my beliefs, I simply want to know where I sit, politically.

Edit: I live in Canada, hours away from any large cities. I need help defining my political beliefs. I don't know if I am right or left.

Pro:

Individual rights

Abortion choice

Medical choice

Recognizing same sex marriage

Universal healthcare

Tax funded public schools until 18/grade 12

Simple tax laws

Buying local.

Bartering and trading

Legalizing sale of raw milk and rainwater collection

Legalization of raw/plant based drugs (marijuana, mushrooms)

Decriminalization of personal posession of harder drugs.

Castle doctrine protections.

Anti:

Government overreach

Mandates (edit: other than for protection of natural resources like banning of pesticides, dumping of sewage, banning of certain forever chemicals or food additives, etc)

Consumerism

"Big Brother" activities

Most corporation bailouts (I can make exceptions for farms/food supply)

Flooded borders

Bylaws and HOAs Excessive international aid

So i am 18 and recently graduated from high school so i don't know much about any of this stuff and the last time i deeply studied about political and economic systems was in 10th grade (ik ik, we got a weird education system in my country) and since i have only read about things from online articles or reddit and now i want a book which would like build a foundation for all the other stuff, i am really fascinated by democratic socialism or socialism as a whole, someone told me that "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" will be good, what do you guys think? Also i recently got to know about the ideas of Communalism by Murray Bookchin, that really interested me too. (Sorry for the bad english, i am not a native speaker!)

Hey everyone, 

I just wanted to come on here to sus out my chances of getting into a top-20 PhD program in poli sci this upcoming cycle. Let me know what you guys think of my quals: 

Recent graduate from top-75 university in the U.S. with a degree in poli sci and degree in business with a concentration on data analysis — 4.0 GPA summa cum laude for both degrees. In short, I have a demontrated background in quantitative course work - such as econ, stats, coding, etc. - as well as a poli sci degree.  

1 conference presentation during undergrad at MPSA related to my field of interest — this was on a what you would call a “term paper.” I have 0 publications and did not complete a senior thesis — this was not required for my program and I wouldn’t have had the time (I took 46 credits - 16 classes - my last 2 semesters).

RAships with a PhD student at an Ivy and potentially with a prof in a top-5 dept in the UK (these are very recent - started in summer 2026) 

Research fellowship at not so well known think tank based in DC, I basically wrote an article or two explaining phenomena related to my research interests  

I am also fluent in the language of and native to the country I would like to be the focus of my dissertation — my focus is religion in politics and I am also pursuing extra undergrad coursework on said religion. 

I am looking at schools that do NOT require the GRE this cycle. I have already identified the professors that align with my interests and I would like to work with. I also know the methods I would like to use in my work, mainly CHA. 

I have extensive community leadership and public speaking experience. I also completed 4 internships related to my other degree. But I assume these are largely irrelevant.

Please let me know what you think of my chances. Forgive me for my writing - I wrote this up on one go on my phone b4 bed, lol. 

I wanna know about politics and geo politics.

Most people assume that I'm a left wing just because I'm a muslim.

But trust me I hate both forms of politics.

I jst want someone who can educate me on this topic

I graduated with a political science degree and a minor in mandarin in 2024. Since then I worked as an ETA in China (1year) and when I came back a worked as a server,substitute teacher, clinical trials research assistant and now I am a clerk at a estate litigation law firm. I’ve had 4 different jobs in 2026 and I just feel really lost.

I read a lot of the the lawyer subs on Reddit and I read job boards every night before I got to bed. Lawyers look really unhappy and my parents are pressuring me to go back to school/get a better job. But I just don’t see where I fit in to the job market at all.

The only dream job I ever really wanted was being an FSO. But that path people say you should have a plan B/C. I just feel so stuck and I’ve been trying to figure out for a year now what I should even do/be/apply to.

I have always been very interested in people facing roles, foreign governments, and languages. I think even jobs in business related to this are few and far between.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Or stories they can share? I’m really desperate for advice or even just someone to relate to

I just switched from a science major, specifically nursing, to Political Science Pre-Law. This is my first semester taking Political Science classes, and I’m not really sure how to study for them because I’ve only studied for science classes before, which are pretty different from the classes I’m taking now.
I feel like when I leave class, I’m actually more confused than when I went in . I’m not sure what I’m supposed to write down in my notes, what I should focus on during lectures, or what I’m supposed to do when I sit down to study.
How do you study for classes like Political Science, Public Administration, International Relations, etc.? Do you mostly take notes, write summaries, make flashcards, read the textbook, or do something else?
Any advice would be appreciated!

Based on a similar (idiotic) italian instrument developed by a journalist, i present to you the fascist meter. You can try answering yes/no to every single point and see how deep your fascist belefies go. Calculate the percentage with your total yes answers divided by 22 and multiplied by 100.

Think of countries like the US, Canada, Norway, and Australia. My assumption is that, since democratic leaders want their citizens to be productive, they already were in those cases. Does the discovery of natural resources make them even more productive? But is there more to it than that?

scored really well in 12th and thought i wanted to do give UPSC and become a bureaucrat. But after coming to college and growing up a bit, i've realized that's not for me. Now I'm kind of confused and lost about what to do next. help a girl out pleek

Old but gold. A classic video of Professor Randall Schweller explaining Realism Theory in international relations.

How has studying political science affected your view of the world and its major issues, such as war, conflicts, competition, national and international politics? I'd love to hear your thoughts

This is a newish sub buts its been basically extinct for a month🥀 r/TeenagerButPolitical

‼️RECRUITING CURIOUS YOUTHS INTERESTED IN PUBLISHING SOCIO-POLITICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL RESEARCH ‼️

- Publish your research, case studies, and thought experiments on a dedicated website + let others debate respond

- Collaborate and debate with fellow students on systems, societal-political commentary, world issues

- Work together to design an alternate society and utopia

Hi, I'm a high school senior building The Youth Manifesto --- an independent research and ideas laboratory exploring how societies can become better through the lens of designing a utopia from studying past, current systems, or exploring possible future ones, grounding it in real socio-political research. We're making a dedicated website where members can explore questions about society through research, political and philosophical writing, commentary, case studies, thought experiments, and real-world analysis.

A big part of the website is 🌏The Better World Project🌍, where you can publish your own research and ideas about what a better society could look like through an essay, thought experiment, or even publish various studies on our current society. ❗But what differentiates the Youth Manifesto is that it's also an ongoing exchange of ideas and open dialogue. There people can respond to, challenge, expand, or propose alternatives to other contributors’ work ❗. The project is ultimately about youth voices, independent learning, constructive disagreement, and collective thinking—giving curious young people a space to research things they genuinely care about, share their perspectives, and learn from people who think differently.

📣📣I’m currently looking for people to help me build the foundation of the project. I’d especially love to connect with people interested in politics, sociology, philosophy, economics, international relations, research, writing, history, or just exploring big questions about how society works and how it could be different. You don’t need to be an expert, just curious and willing to contribute.

If you're a student interested in publishing your own ideas and research, feel free to reach out!
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc2wWKZnABckQEAquOLpSRz2rl_HWesxnljT0oSLlHrQlTo8g/viewform?usp=publish-editor

I've become a lot more politically engaged over the past year — I follow current events, form opinions, and I genuinely enjoy discussing them. But I keep running into the same pushback from different directions.

With my parents: whenever politics comes up and I point out something factually wrong in what they're saying, it turns into a lecture. They connect my interest in politics to me not clearing NEET, saying it's a distraction. Their argument is that unless I clear something like UPSC and actually hold power, caring about politics is pointless.

With friends at my PG: a casual conversation turned political, and most of the girls didn't want to engage. Their reasoning was similar — discussing it changes nothing since we're not public figures, so it just ends up making us feel worse for no reason.

My counterargument has been that awareness matters, that movements start with ordinary people caring before anyone has formal power, and that refusing to even discuss things doesn't seem reasonable just because we're not in charge.

Honestly, what gets to me more than any single argument is just how apolitical most people around me seem to be. It's not that they disagree with me — they don't even want to engage. At my PG, the moment politics came up, it was an immediate wall: "don't discuss politics here," "not right now," "not this topic" — no one even willing to hear the sentence out. And at home, the second I bring something up, I'm treated like I'm talking nonsense, like I'm just a distracted kid who should shut up and study.

It genuinely makes me sad. This is a country of over a billion people, and it sometimes feels like almost no one wants to actually sit with an uncomfortable topic for five minutes. Caring is treated like the weird thing, and not caring is treated like the mature, responsible default.

The one person who doesn't make me feel this way is my boyfriend. He's someone who actually stays engaged with what's happening around him and cares when people are being hurt or treated unfairly. Talking to him about this stuff feels different — like the caring itself isn't something I have to justify or defend. It's made me realize how rare that is, and how much most of my other conversations feel like I'm the problem just for wanting to talk.

So yeah — maybe I'm asking two questions now: is their "you have no power so why bother" argument reasonable? And separately — am I wrong to feel this disheartened by how few people even want to have the conversation at all?

Hi Guys. Re Hi~

I've been building a public dashboard that treats the 296 sitting members of South Korea's National Assembly as a graph, and infers edges between them from Korean-language news coverage rather than from roll-call votes. It's live and open source, and I'd genuinely like this sub to poke holes in the method.

Live board: https://korea-politician.vercel.app

Source: https://github.com/showjihyun/KoreaPolitician

What the graph contains right now — 296 Member nodes, 8 Party nodes, 296 affiliation edges, 39 directed sentiment edges (36 conflict, 3 alliance), 368 co-mention edges.

How edges are derived — A nightly job pulls articles from the politics, economy, and society sections of a major Korean news portal and resolves which legislators are named. Name resolution took the most work: Korean given names are short and frequently appear inside unrelated words, so I use longest-match masking plus a boundary check rather than substring matching.

Two different time bases, deliberately — the design decision I'd most like feedback on:

- Relations are cumulative. A conflict, once observed, is never dropped.

- Attention is a 7-day rolling window. News mentions plus log-normalized YouTube views.

Mixing a cumulative measure and a rolling one in one view risks misreading, so each panel carries its window as a visible label and a tooltip. I'm not sure that's sufficient.

Attention scoring — YouTube views are log-compressed (1k → 0, 10M → 100) before being added to the news component, and an article naming n legislators contributes 1/√n to each, so roundup pieces don't inflate everyone equally.

Where I know it's weak — the dataset is new (collection started 2026-08-30, so "cumulative" is days, not years); no inter-coder reliability on the sentiment edges; one news portal; coverage ≠ influence; conflict outnumbers alliance 36:3, which may be real or may be an extraction artifact.

What I'd like input on —
(1) Is media co-occurrence defensible as a complement to vote-based measures like W-NOMINATE, or is coverage bias fatal?
(2) What's the minimum validation before sentiment edges count as data — a hand-coded n=200 with reported kappa?
(3) Has anyone handled the cumulative-vs-rolling presentation problem well?

Hi everyone, I’m thinking of pursuing Political Science.

What roadmap should I follow to do well in this field?

What skills should I have to be good at it?

What exactly should I do if I want to move abroad?

Which country values Political Science majors the most?

Is anyone here working in this field? If so, what has your experience been like?

Are any of you working in government departments or related fields?

If so, what are your thoughts?

I really need some guidance

As an international student that wants to study international relations in Europe or America, I have no idea what universities to consider. All research I do seems to lead me in a loop with conflicting testimonies both from people and websites, and even from alumni of prestigious universities. I also have very little perspective on my personal desirability for universities, being fluent in English, passing 8 AP exams and having a 1450+ on the SAT as well as basically the equivalent of a 4.0 GPA in my own country whilst lacking in extracurricular activities.

What universities would you guys recommend, both for a good education and for finding a well paying job?

hello, I'm sorry if this isn't the right subreddit and would be grateful if someone would guide me to the right one if it isn't so but I'm desperate rn

I really wanted to pursue pol science for my bachelor's, then masters and PhD to ultimately go into teaching in any scandinavian country. the situation in my country is bleak when it comes to pol sci education (and rights in general for people like me), and if I don't go abroad for masters, I'll just get married off which I do not want. my girlfriend and I have a whole plan for masters but I know I want it in pol sci alone.

my parents have currently forced me to do law and it is eating away at me bcs I know it's not something I want to do. is there anyone in professoral teaching in a scandinavian country right now who could guide me as to how everything would work later down the line so that I can convince my parents?

thank you so much, and apologies if there're any grammatical errors; english is most definitely not my first language

Iam studying in 12 grade and am from india i like politics and i like to pursue political science so all i have heard that after taking political science that we can do only teaching and preparing for govt exams in india so i started to discover careers in political science so i heard about political consultant and political analyst and international relations so is this real i never heard of such jobs so somebody explain to me how can we get to these kind of jobs and have a good career

So, for context, I recently graduated from a prestigious university with a masters' in political science. However, I feel that in this economy especially, I need to branch out to other fields a little bit to make myself more marketable beyond government-related jobs and the public sector.

Given finance and business tend, at least in my experience, to be a somewhat popular career choice for Political Science majors (and those in the social sciences/humanities in general), I was wondering if anyone had advice on how to make that transition and gain skills that would make employers in these field more attuned to my resume without getting another degree. Is Udemy and other certification websites - e.g. Google, even - the right way forward here or should I just blindly apply for business internships at various companies hoping that one eventually sticks, despite me not necessarily having the standard credentials. Appreciate your time and advice in advance.

hi guys! im in my second year of cc as a government major (planning to switch to poli sci), but i would like some experiences in my field, my school doesn't really offer much, and ive spent the whole summer searching and applying. yet, nothing pulled through. I was wondering if perhaps i could find some suggestions on where else to look or what to look for. i only have experience as an intern from two years ago, and my current job (cashier). i've checked local law firms but there is only sooo much in houston that are actually opened to hiring someone like me! i want to be a lawyer, and be very hands on with politics especially in my city, so if anyone could direct me that would be amazing! i have also checked volunteering with my local government, but for some reason it seems everything is so coded and hidden? maybe its something im doing wrong?

Hi everyone! I am a political science student and am taking my first course in political methodology this fall. I am not very good at math so naturally I am a little worried. Does anyone have any tips on how to prepare for this type of course? What to expect? I took a statistics course online a few semesters ago. But like I said I’m not a math person so I’m not sure how much I’ll actually remember. I know the course is difficult so I’m trying to mentally prepare myself. Any advice or insight would be greatly appreciated!

I often see on the internet left wing and right wing politics, socialism, communism and libertarianism. I want to understand these concepts.

Can somebody recommend an easy to understand book which explains these concepts.

Hello everyone, I'm currently an undergraduate student pursuing bachelors degrees in Political Science and Philosophy (second year polisci and second year philosophy). I'm a very good student scoring marks at the very top of my class in both disciplines. I am absolutely sure that academia is for me and it would be a dream for me to pursue a PhD in The United States.

What are some things that I can do to make my application as competitive as possible (I think two degrees is a nice plus)?

I'm mostly interested in political theory, which universities have the strongest programmes in that field?

What are some things that I should know about studying in The US as an European?