Peter Ubertaccio - The CQ Press Career Guide for American Politics Students

My hope is this guide will appeal to any student with an interest in the subject. Students find themselves in courses in this field because of their interest in politics, government, campaigns and elections, and current events. Very few choose to go directly into a Ph.D. program. Indeed, interim steps between undergraduate work and graduate school are often a requirement for some of the best Ph.D. programs in the field.

The book begins by encouraging students to think about their own stories and the problems in this world they hope to solve. It encourages them to think about this before worrying about an older question, What do you want to be? Students redirected away from this narrow question are much better prepared for many other questions this book will help them consider, for example:

• What can you do with your interest?
• How can you leverage your interests and academic work for employment after college?
• What steps should you be taking now to ensure your professional readiness after graduation?

begins the process of examining each of these questions, designed to help students with an interest in politics align their academic and co-curricular pursuits to skills and career readiness competencies that are in demand by employers in the field. It lays out an important checklist that students can use to begin this process, including resume review, a social media strategy, and what networking really means.

discusses the variety of other pursuits open to the student of politics, from graduate school to professional school to nonprofit work, education, think tanks, and more.

Ive had the pleasure of teaching hundreds of students at Stonehill College, and as they move on to a variety of career and service opportunities, and graduate and professional schools, they continue to reinforce my belief that a good, rigorous education in politics complements the demands of the twenty-first-century job market. My research assistant, Jenna Christiansen, helped me with some of the background research for this book. Jenna not only took advantage of multiple opportunities discussed here (course travel to DC, internships in DC and Boston, co-curricular leadership on campus), but matched her experiential components with rigorous academics and was the highest-ranking graduate in Bachelor of Arts at Stonehill in 2018.

I am particularly grateful to Robert P. Hager, Jr, Ray Silvius, Gilbert Gagn, Laurie Sprankle, Dave Benjamin, Rachael Vanessa Cobb, Maurice T. Cunningham, and John Kenneth White for their helpful comments when this guide was in proposal form and for encouragement I received from Monica Eckman at SAGE/CQ.