The Ph.D. in Political Science
Thank you for your interest in our Ph.D. program. Here you will find in-depth information about our Department, including our history, philosophy, and curriculum. We are recognized as one of the top ten programs in the nation, as evidenced by the most recent rankings by U.S. News & World Report and the National Academy of Sciences. We also were rated #1 in the nation in overall graduate student satisfaction (National Doctoral Program Survey). As you might imagine, we are very proud of our faculty, our program, and our students.Our Department believes that political science is a coherent discipline, rather than independent subfields loosely grouped under a shared umbrella. As a reflection of this belief, our program is designed to break down barriers and build bridges across the subfields and give all of our students a broad command of the discipline as a whole, regardless of their area(s) of specialization.
In accordance with these principles, we have recently reformed our graduate program to include a first-year curriculum required of all incoming students and composed of three quarters of courses in "principles of politics" and three quarters of "methods" courses. Our graduate program is a unique statement about the discipline of political science. No similar attempt to unify the curriculum has been undertaken in any other department in the country.
Our program is designed to be completed in four to six years. In the first two years of the program, students attend seminars, write a research paper, and attempt a comprehensive examination. Students then finalize a dissertation prospectus and defend it before their dissertation committee. Students spend their fourth year and beyond conducting their dissertation research, writing their dissertation, and defending their completed project before their committee.
News
UCSD ranked 2nd
UC San Diego has ranked 2nd out of 258 institutions in Washington Monthly's 2009 national university college rankings.
UCSD ranked 7th
U.S. News & World Report ranked UC San Diego the 7th best public university in the nation in its 2010 America's Best Colleges guidebook. UCSD is 35th among the 262 public and private universities ranked.