Woodrow Wilson School
What Students Say
• 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?
- 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.