If you are interested in government, policy, international business, research and analysis, or non-profit work, International Relations is an amazing major. International Relations is a great melding of the humanities that leads to a deep understanding of the global financial system and the relationship between different nations. Students take courses in economics, political science, history, and language, and go on to careers that span politics, policy, philanthropy, and global business.
What we find with students interested in International Relations, especially sophomores, is that they feel like they are doing all of the right things, and yet can’t articulate how they will stand out as an applicant. We work with our students to develop the activities and academic successes that ensure that their application isn’t solely counting on being singled out by exceptional grades. Most students applying to top colleges have stand-out grades and scores, so there has to be something else driving your application and giving confidence to the application readers that you will thrive. In this post, we’ll give you a peek behind the curtain of how we work with driven students to ensure that they are a heavy hitter come application time.
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The activities you do will be personal to you, but there are a few ‘buckets’ or types that you need to address if you want to be as strong of an applicant as you can by senior fall. You don’t have to do all of this, especially if it would hamper your academic success, but you should absolutely aim for two or three significant leadership positions by senior year. This could range from becoming a head of Model UN to a manager at our summer job. Sophomore year is the perfect time to start working towards this goal — so dig in!
MODEL UN
When we’re putting these lists together, we don’t normally prescribe a specific activity that you should be doing. Different students have different preferences and skills, and so it makes sense to point you in the right direction but not prescribe specifically what you need to do. This is not the case for students interested in International Relations.
If your school offers Model UN and you are not already involved, you need to join today. If you are already involved in Model UN at your school, you need to have a conversation with your faculty advisor to gauge what you can do as a member, leader, and mentor to support your fellow participants in their journey towards success.
This is because simply doing Model UN isn’t enough — we want you to excel at it. We want you to be putting yourself on a trajectory to receive recognitions, attain leadership, and support your peers. This involvement illustrates to colleges that you have deep character, curiosity, and care for others.
Now, what if your school doesn’t have a Model UN program? Today is the day you take the first step towards starting one. This may take a full year on its own, but you’ll also be the founder and student leader of the group. Find a faculty advisor to advocate alongside you to the administration, and make it happen. Every club started somewhere, and the Model UN at your school starts here.
WRITING & RESEARCH
We often see sophomores overlook, or don’t even know about, opportunities for independent writing and research. You are decidedly not limited to what is on offer at school, and paying for programs isn’t the only way to access additional knowledge and feed your curiosity. We encourage our students to take on independent writing, like doing op-eds or thought pieces focused on international issues for your school paper or an online teen newspaper, or expanding work you have done for school to submit to venues like the Concord Review. There are so many other outstanding options for publication, and we love starting students off with this list of 70 places to get published from the NYTimes.
To accomplish this, you’ll probably be taking on independent research. Learning how to research in an academic way beyond what you are being assigned at school is an outstanding skill to build before you get to college, and sophomore year is an ideal time to start.
EXTRA COURSES VS. SUMMER PROGRAMS
For international relations students, we do not see a strong argument for paying for a program that has a small amount of education and a lot of s’mores around the campfire (or other similarly summer-campy activities). If you want to do something purely for fun, that’s totally okay — but don’t try to mash it together with academics and hope to come out on top. Instead, we advise our sophomores to break their summer up into a few chunks. Maybe there is a trip you want to take right at the start of summer, or to close things out, but in the middle, you work, research, and take an online course, or an in-person course with local community college. As a sophomore, you won’t have access to most four-year college summer courses, but many community colleges will permit you to enroll, and your high school may even be willing to reflect the course on your transcript.
Taking an additional course can be a deeply impactful way of amplifying your interest in international relations, especially if your school has minimal or no directly relevant electives.
Basically, what you are showing is intellectual curiosity beyond the classroom. But, while your research or independent writing is entirely self-motivated, this class will come with a grade. That grade will illustrate to application readers that you really do know more than your peers about this subject, and that you are putting in the work to be able to study it at a high level.
research
We help our clients figure out their niche within an area of interest. Recently, we’ve had clients who want to pursue a major in International Relations have niches within the politics of diplomacy, modern war theory, and negotiating peace in conflict zones. We’ve helped them narrow even further, and then have facilitated research opportunities. We love when students work directly with professors and get published on papers.
CUSTOMER-FACING SUMMER JOB
You may have noticed that we mentioned employment in the last section. That was not, in fact, a mistake. We highly recommend that our students, especially ones from more well-off communities, get a job for at least one summer before applying to college. In many ways, sophomore year is the best time to do this as you aren’t in the intense push towards college applications yet. A summer gig can continue into the year, or just be for a summer, but even if a role is small this isn’t busy work.
For prospective international relations majors, we especially encourage that a summer job be customer-facing. This means that you aren’t doing social media for your aunt, even if it would be paid. These are the types of summer jobs you see on TV: sales associate at a retail store, serving at a local diner, or working at a farmstand. The point isn’t to learn the ins and outs of retail mark-ups or hashbrown doneness. The purpose, here, is to do a few things:
Develop tenacity and exhibit drive.
Hone teamwork and collaboration.
Show that you know how to work.
That last one may, you might argue, be proven by a strong transcript. False. For all colleges know, you might have a parent staring over your shoulder every night until your homework is perfect. They hope this isn’t the case, but they can’t be sure. They do know, though, that your parent isn’t delivering that soda to table 6. You have to do that on your own, underlining that you’ve also earned every grade you have through equally hard work.
As a driven and passionate sophomore, you have the opportunity to truly stand out by taking bold moves while still early in your high school experience. We’ve found that the work that is done now pays massive dividends when it comes time to write.
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