Career Options for POSC

Why choose Political Science at CSULB?

Political science is a recognized academic discipline that combines the best aspects of the liberal arts tradition.  It trains students to think critically while arming them with important information about the 21st century; thus, it prepares them for the workforce and for the demands of democratic citizenship today.  It draws on contemporary issues such as geopolitics, immigration, changing demographics, cyberspace politics, and terrorism, and provides students with strong analytic skills in order to analyze these.  Moreover, with its combined focus on critical thinking and empirical knowledge, political science empowers students to question the values of our society and to orient our democratic ideals to the changing realities of the current century.  Its broad, liberal arts framework inspires active citizenship and offers training that will serve students’ needs throughout their entire lives.

The CSULB Political Science Department is known as one of the top political science programs in the CSU system, and one of the most reputable non-Ph.D. granting political science programs in the region. CSULB political science offers undergraduate and MA students a wide range of rigorous, intellectually-challenging courses taught by a diverse and talented faculty who take both teaching and research seriously.

The political science major teaches students to think seriously and carefully about politics while preparing them for a wide variety of careers—such as K-12, community college and university teaching; law; government and foreign service;  non-profit work; and business. POSC graduates regularly are accepted to law school, M.A. programs, and Ph.D. programs at some of the country’s most prestigious universities, including Yale, Harvard, UC Berkeley, UCLA, and Northwestern.

A liberal arts education—such as Political Science major—will give you the skills and knowledge that you need to succeed in business and other fields. In an interview, four CEOs discuss the importance of the liberal arts and the traits they look for in the graduates they hire. Drawing on their own educations as liberal arts majors these CEOs attribute their success in part to the broad base of knowledge and critical thinking skills they learned as undergraduates.  Additionally, they speak about their preference for intellectually curious, liberally educated college graduates who have the ability to learn new skills over those who have been trained narrowly.

 

POSC Career Information Sheet

Resources on graduate education and careers for POSC majors

 

Positions in the Political Science Department

CLA Employment