Woodrow Wilson School
Photo: Jasmine Chen
The Woodrow Wilson School (WWS) offers a multidisciplinary liberal arts major for students who desire to be engaged in public service and become leaders in the world of public and international affairs. To enable students to acquire the tools, understanding, and habits of mind necessary to pursue policy problems of their choosing, the major is largely self-designed but with the structure and guidance needed for an education that is both broad and deep.
The curriculum is founded upon WWS courses, cross-listed with multiple departments that are relevant to the study of policymaking, policy analysis, and policy evaluation. Students take courses in at least four disciplines, including economics, history, politics, psychology, sociology, and science for public policy. One course in ethics is also required. Students enroll in policy seminars in the junior year and write a policy thesis in the senior year.
What Students Say
• What is public and international affairs?
• What can you learn from it?
• What is it like being a Woodrow Wilson School major?
• What are common misconceptions about Woodrow Wilson School majors?
• What kind of internships and international experiences have majors had?
• How will Woodrow Wilson School majors save the world?
• Why would anyone want to date a Woodrow Wilson School major?
What is public and international affairs?
Not all Woodrow Wilson Students have to go into public service, however. The unifying characteristic of WWS students is that they are passionate about policy issues, but there are many different ways to make an impact. In many cases, WWS attracts students from scientific backgrounds, and they often continue their work in industry rather than joining the Foreign Service or running for office. WWS is nice because it gives students a solid understanding and appreciation for policy issues, but how students choose to apply that training is completely up to them. Even if you don't work directly in the public sector, there are a variety of ways to make a positive impact in different policy areas, so don't think that being in the Wilson School means you are expected to join the government after graduation.
One student spent his entire summer out of the US traveling around Asia. Thanks to some contacts of his professors, he was able to work with Creative Commons in Taiwan and learn about copyright, traveling to Seoul, Hong Kong, and Shanghai in the process. During part of that time he was able to talk with officials in the Hong Kong government about proposed copyright reform and discuss the different policies they were considering. All of this was done with some funding and support from professors in the department, and enabled him to get an early start on his thesis by spending the summer figuring out what topic was a good fit with his interests and the current needs of policymakers in other countries.
Thinking of WWS as saving the world may be a bit strong. You shouldn't take yourself too seriously. Students in the Wilson School are really talented and definitely can make contributions to different problems, but the world is a big place, and if major problems could be handled by a handful of Princeton students we wouldn't still be working on those issues. We strive to make an impact and take society step by step towards better solutions, but these are tasks that are much bigger than us. If we can make big strides towards a better outcome, we're doing a really good job.
• What can you learn from it?
• What is it like being a Woodrow Wilson School major?
• What are common misconceptions about Woodrow Wilson School majors?
• What kind of internships and international experiences have majors had?
• How will Woodrow Wilson School majors save the world?
• Why would anyone want to date a Woodrow Wilson School major?
What is public and international affairs?
Public and international affairs is a very broad discipline that encompasses both domestic and international policy. The Woodrow Wilson School takes a multidisciplinary approach to analyzing a variety of important, current policy issues.
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One advantage to WWS is that you can give yourself an interdisciplinary background more easily than in many other majors; you can also choose the policy area of greatest interest to you (health, environment, international organizations, etc.), and you can focus on a region (Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America Europe, etc.). This type of education is useful in many work environments because you'll be able to bridge the social scientists, engineers, and economists — you'll be able to understand all their arguments and synthesize them. You will have a lot of freedom in your choices of what to take, but you will have a policy area adviser who will help you make sure that you get enough depth in your field of study.
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What is it like being a Woodrow Wilson School major?
The resources and experiences in WWS are incredible. If you want to spend the summer traveling around Asia interviewing people for your thesis, you'll probably be able to find funding for it. If you really feel passionate about healthcare, you can join a task force that presents findings to the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services. Whatever your interests are, you'll find resources and contacts in the department that enable you to go into depth and really focus on the things that drive you. That sort of immersion is difficult to find as an undergraduate, but at the end of your time at Princeton you'll find that it will allow you to gain a deep understanding of major issues if you take advantage of the resources the department gives you.
Like any other department, WWS has its defining characteristics. In particular, you take a task force in one semester of your junior year and a policy research seminar in the other.
The task forces and policy research seminars are generally comprised of 8 to 10 students who have class one night per week on a given topic. Before each semester, you put down your first, second, and third choices for a task force topic, but most people generally end up with their first choice. The early weeks are spent becoming familiar with your topic in preparation for a more in-depth exploration of the policy questions involved. Each seminar differs in how one selects a JP topic, but generally you have some flexibility within the scope of your task force's general topic. An important difference between WWS junior papers and those of other departments is that the WWS JP is a policy paper!
The task force is set up in such a way that the conclusions of your JP will generally be recommendations to your "client" or audience. The individual papers produced by yourself and the other members of your task force will ultimately be compiled into a cohesive final set of recommendations, a process which is accompanied by discussion of the recommendations contained in each individual paper and their place in the cumulative product. The task force as a whole will make a formal presentation to the client, which can range from a county's board of education to the Department of State in Washington, D.C.
The WWS faculty are what make the program so unique. As a student in WWS, you'll have access to (and in all likelihood, be taught in a small group setting by) professors with extensive career or research experience in diplomacy, politics, and policy-making. You'll have the opportunity to develop close working relationships with accomplished scholars across a variety of substantive disciplines and gain insight into their careers, as well as guidance with respect to your own future.
Unfortunately, some students have the notion that they should concentrate in the Woodrow Wilson School to give them a leg up for finance, consulting, or law. While some students do end up in those types of jobs or in law school, many Woodrow Wilson School students do go into public service, and quite a few spend the summer before their senior year in government or in closely related non-profits, often in Washington, D.C. The Woodrow Wilson School pays for its students to have this experience in the summer before senior year, and it is telling that many students have chosen this route even though they could have earned more at a finance or consulting internship. Even many who go to law school, such as the former dean, Anne-Marie Slaughter, eventually find their way back to public service. Dean Slaughter was the Director of Policy Planning at the Department of State from 2009 to 2011. With the upcoming retirement of a large portion of an aging federal workforce, expect more Woodrow Wilson School majors to enter public service.
WWS is very supportive of study abroad and each year offers several of its task forces in cities around the world. WWS partners with a specific university in each city, making both applying to the programs and, upon a student's return, credit transfer very easy processes. Students only study abroad for one semester, as the department prefers that students write at least one of their JPs at Princeton.
WWS study abroad has really made a difference to students. Unlike other departments, the Woodrow Wilson School offers several of its own programs abroad each year. The students take courses at the host university and also take a task force, the seminars in which they do their junior independent work. This year the seminars will be offered in Oxford, Paris, Hong Kong, Cape Town, Istanbul and Havana, as well as an additional location in the middle east. Students study an important policy issue relevant to the country or region in which they are studying. We appreciate getting to see many of the things we learned in the task force classes firsthand. A student in Cape Town, for example, said that he learned “why exactly it has been so difficult to effectively deal with…the plethora of problems that South Africa still struggles with after apartheid. My emotions were a strange flux of frustration and hope of the kind that I have never experienced before coming to South Africa.”
The task force experience abroad can vary:
- One student who studied abroad in Oxford had a task force of eleven students with an Oxford professor who also brought other well-respected academics from Europe for guest lectures. However, the task force experience differed from task forces at Princeton in that they did not have a "senior commissioner" to guide or write the final report. Instead, the task force elected two (or in her case three) leaders to step into the role that the senior commissioner traditionally fills.
- Another student, the lone WWS student that year studying abroad in Santiago, Chile, wrote a JP rather than participating in a task force; although she felt it was much more difficult at the time, in retrospectshe felt it prepared her better for the independent research she did on her thesis. It also meant that she had more freedom in choosing what to write about.
- A third student’s Cairo experience fell somewhere in between the first two. There were only four WWS students there but they were joined by three Egyptian students. The topic was broad enough that it still allowed them to pursue whatever they wanted but there were enough of them to give the full give-and-take experience that occurs in a normal-sized task force like in Oxford or Princeton. Going abroad was a vital part of her WWS and Princeton experience because it gave her first-hand knowledge of the topic at hand and let her not only get down and dirty in the streets of Cairo but also meet the people who were working most directly on the subject. It's one thing to study something in Princeton and something very different to live it in Egypt.
WWS is very supportive of international experiences in other respects, particularly in terms of thesis research funding.
On the internship side, there are many summer opportunities for Woody Woo students. Many WWS students work in D.C. at the Department of State, agencies like USAID, and various policy-related think tanks. The WWS department offers summer internship funding for policy-related summer internship work.
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The question should be a tautology: the point of public service is to save the world. How else will problems such as global warming, expensive health care, AIDS, human rights abuses, (insert pet issue here) be solved if not for sound public policy?
In all seriousness, though, Woodrow Wilson School majors cannot save the world. What we can do is write policy, which can have an impact on global problems. The most important thing to remember, however, is that even though we are fallible (and therefore cannot save the world) we still have a serious responsibility to use our skills to serve the public good, in whatever capacity we can.
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WWS majors can be some of the most interesting, genuine people you'll meet at Princeton. They come from different places, but have genuine interests in what they study, as well as helping others. If you like people who are genuine and reliable (usually desirable qualities), you're very likely to find people like that in the department.
Flip response: If Woody Woo students are going to try to make world peace, they should be able to make a relationship work, right?