Follow us on Instagram
Try our daily mini crossword
Play our latest news quiz
Download our new app on iOS/Android!

Expand WWS Study Abroad

The Woodrow Wilson School prides itself on being an internationally renowned and globally-oriented public policy school, one that aims to train its students to bring a “global perspective” to its curriculum. International affairs are clearly a core component of the Wilson School's identity, whether in the areas of expertise of its faculty, the research centers it endows, the courses it offers, or its undergraduate concentration areas. Yet somehow our vaunted international relations major, one of the only such programs at Princeton, and certainly the only social science or humanities major, that severely restricts the opportunities its concentrators have to study abroad.

Each year, Woody Woo majors are given a choice of just four or five study abroad options per semester, during which they take a full course load at the host university as well as the standard Wilson School policy task force seminar in which they write one of their two JPs. These study abroad options, while rated favorably by those who have participated in them, remain woefully lacking in the breadth of countries or universities it allows students to travel to. Instead of requiring students to take their task force with them if they go abroad, and thereby limiting them to the four or five schools each semester that host a Wilson School Task Force, the University should instead require students going abroad to take their Task Force in the semester they are on campus, and allow them to write an independent JP abroad in lieu of their Research Seminar JP on campus (as the politics department currently does).

ADVERTISEMENT

The restriction to such a small set of study abroad options is intrinsically at odds with the goal of the Wilson School in preparing students for leadership on public policy issues in the United States and around the world. Students should be allowed to experience the culture and academic environment of whichever country their personal and policy interests align with (within reason), and restricting students’ exposure to a set of just seven to ten countries creates a set of alumni less suited for the full breadth of international policy issues that the program purports to prepare them for.

Additionally, the way these foreign Task Forces are designed further restricts students’ options, by tying a particular policy topic and particular study abroad program together. While there are unquestionably topics that logically fit together with the places in which they are held (e.g. Queen’s University Belfast being home to a Task Force relating to terrorism and border violence). However, for students who want to write their independent work on a different topic but still wish to go to a given university, this policy actively dissuades them from doing so, by forcing them to devote their research and independent work to a topic outside of their main academic passion in order to study abroad where they choose. If the University allowed study-abroad students to write an independent paper as a substitute for the Research Seminar JP, rather than a Task Force report, a student writing on terrorism could still get the location-based research benefits and resources of studying in Belfast. It would, however, also expand the benefits to students studying arts and cultural policy, integration, immigration or British foreign affairs. Rather than having to write a JP only on a specific, non-negotiable topic that may not otherwise be in their interest area in order to study in a particular country, then, students could write an independent JP on a topic that was more meaningful to them, while still benefitingfrom the experience of studying abroad.

The Wilson School would better serve its own mission, as well as its students, by allowing students to study abroad at nearly any approved university they choose, as nearly all other University departments do. Students with particular language interests, niche areas of policy focus, or simply a strong preference to study in a specific country would all be better served by the standard practice of a wide diversity of study abroad options.

Ryan Dukeman is a Wilson School Major from Westwood, Mass. He can be reached at rdukeman@princeton.edu.

ADVERTISEMENT