Welcome to the online information
session with regard to the graduate
programs in Political Science at the
University of Western Ontario. We're
gonna do a couple things today; talk a
little bit about some etiquette in terms
of managing the managing the session
today. I'll give you an overview of the department,
about what kinds of things we do and the
kinds of faculty institutes that we have.
I'll talk a little bit about why you
should choose Western. I'll give you an
overview of our masters and PhD programs
talk a little bit about placement
outcomes and then we'll do a Q&A session
at the end where I can answer, we'll
answer your questions. So today I'll be
your presenter. I'm professor Chris Alcantara.
I am a professor in Department.
I'm also the Graduate chair of the
program. Okay so let me talk a little bit
about the department at a glance. We have
24 full-time faculty members and so that
includes teaching faculty that includes
assistant professors for junior faculty
members that we've hired. we have
associate professors for mid-career
professors. and then we have full
professors. So we have all of all the
ranks and we cover all the subfields
which I'll talk about in a moment. In
terms of our graduate program, typically
we let in 20 to 25 MA students in
political science in a typical year and
in the PhD program we let in 4 to 8
doctoral students a year. In terms of the
subfields so we cover all of the major
subfields. We cover Canadian politics
study of our domestic politics in Canada
and all aspects of Canadian politics,
including the study of the state of
society. We also cover comparative
politics a study of similar questions
but across countries across units across
space across time. We have we also cover
the subfield international
relations, the politics of international politics. We do political theory so we cover normative
political theory with specific emphasis on questions
about global justice and critical theory.
And then what makes us really unique is
that we also include a subfield in urban
politics and local governments. We've
long been the place for a study of this
of this issue area and we've produced a
lot of graduates and professors in that
area.
Besides these subfields we also offer a
number of research centers and groups
which is made up of faculty members and
graduate students sometimes
undergraduate students from our
department but from other departments as
as well. So there's a list here some of
the things we do let me just point out a
couple a couple of them we have the 2019
Canadian election study. This is a major
research project it's an honor for
universities and researchers to get that
and so professor Laura Stephenson along
with Allison Terrell, Peter Lowen and
David Rubenstein but the professor
Stevenson is our as our faculty member
and she and her group are running the
Canadian Election Study, which is a big huge survey of
attitudes opinions beliefs and behavior
with respect to how people voted in the
last election. So we had that study here
lots of opportunities to get you know
first chance to use that data if you
come here. It's a very exciting thing we
also have the computational and
quantitative Social Science Research
Center which is run by our Canada
Research Chair in political methodology Dr.
Dave Armstrong and they're looking at
advanced quantitative techniques and the
use of big data techniques and computers
to solve all sorts of social and political problems.
If you're a political theorist you'll want to get
involved in the moral political and
legal philosophy group which brings
together philosophers and political
theorists to talk about issues of
justice. There's also a transitional
justice and post conflict resolution
group led by one of our professors dr.
Joanna Quinn and that you know this
place is the leading place for studying
issues relating to communities that are
going through transitions and trying to
regime transitions and are trying
to ensure that justice is served by that
in post-conflict areas so a great
program. And then finally we have
actually a research center that fits our
subfield of urban politics and local
governance so and that that research
group again looks at was
from other factors as well and they look
at issues of local government in Canada
the United States and elsewhere. So why
come to Western let me just tell you why
we think this is a great place. There's
lots of great reasons to come here the
Faculty of Social Science is ranked
among the top 100 in the world for the
last number of years. So you are coming to a
top-ranked research a place where you
know the entire faculty is producing
top-notch research, and you'll benefit from that
that infrastructure and access to a
variety of faculty members students and
resources. At Western we also have
developed an innovative program called
own your future program that focuses on
PhD students and they're rolling it out
for the master students and the idea is
to help graduate students develop skills
but also be able to articulate those
skills to academic employers and
non-academic employers so whether you're
going for an academic job or non
academic job the own your feature program
which is a university wide program is
aimed to help you know sign of our own
programs that develop and articulate
skills that are marketable in academic
and non-academic work. We also offer
collaborative specializations where you
can do a degree in political science and
do a do some extra bit of work
depending on whether you're doing a
masters or a PhD do you do a
specialization and transitional justice
for instance you know you want to
political science and have a
concentration in transitional justice
you can add that onto your degree as
necessary. And then also in the city
London this is a it's a great city to
live in it's very affordable compared to
some other places in Canada you know
Toronto Vancouver and Montreal are great
places to live but they're you know they
can't be very expensive. London is not so
expensive compared to these other
places generally speaking it's centrally
located we're close to Toronto and close to the United States.
There's lots of things to do here in
terms of it's a big city located you
know amongst in with lots of outdoorsy
things to do so you know our students
really enjoy that or faculty enjoy 
this kind of combination of things about
the City of London.
Why political science and Western? One of
the things that our faculty are
publishing in the best journals the best
University presses in the world so we
have faculty members who are publishing
in American Political Science Review the
APSR which is the top journal in the
discipline followed by the American
Journal of Political Science. So we have
faculty members who are publishing these
places. We have faculty members
publishing in the best university
presses like Oxford University Press
Cambridge University Press.
So we know how to produce the best
research we know how to publish the best
research and so coming here you have the
advantage and that of working with
faculty members who've been published in
the best places you know whether it's
the best journals or presses in
political science or whether it's the
best journals in your sub field whether
it's about elections or Canadian
politics or social movements. Our people
here are able to do these things and are
able to publish in these places and you'll
be able to work with work with us in
doing that. So that leads me to the
second thing is there are lots of
opportunities to do interesting things
both in research and teaching so on the
research side a number of our a large
proportion of our faculty members engage
in co-authorship with with graduate
students both at the Masters level and
at the PhD level. So I for instance, I've
been writing a number of papers with MA
and PhD students and we publish them
in different journals. So there's lots of
opportunities for co-authorship you know
our faculty members are always looking
for some for grad students and giving
them opportunities to do research as
research assistants to support our
research. Also in terms of co-authorship
we have a real culture of that, that's
growing here at Western. Students our
students are cooperating with each other
so PhD students and masters students are
co-authoring with each other. We
encourage that by giving opportunities
to think through those works and to
think through that those projects so the
real culture of co-authorship at Western
that we're trying to cultivate and it's
growing. There's lots of options for
research assistants the number of our
faculty members are always applying for
research grants and we always turn to
graduate students because we're a
smaller perhaps a smaller program than
some other places that means there more
opportunities for you if there's 24
faculty members you know 30 graduate
students there's lots of opportunities for. W
also will give you opportunities to be a
teaching assistant at the
Masters level and at the PhD level so if
you're a master's student we tend to put
you into teaching assistant
opportunities in first the first year
class where you'll be running tutorials
you'll be helping to grade assignments.
If you're  aPhD student we tend to try to
put you into the second year's classes
as teaching assistants. Another thing
that makes Western really different. I
think is really important. is that we
provide I think one of the most
comprehensive research methods training
programs in the country but not only is
that the most comprehensive it's the
most accessible so you know we know that
a lot of students or some students are
scared about methods and so our approach
to that is it's not about burying people
in math and method it's about creating
conditions under which you can learn. You
know so to put it this way for instance
a lot of students are scared of methods
they're very afraid of math they take
our methods courses and it's the highest
grade of all their graduate courses
that they get and they've learned a ton
of skills. We've had a number of students
who are extremely scared to come out of
it loving research methods. So you know
one one example we have is a PhD student
who was very concerned about about the
methods training, was asking about how he
can get out of it and you know do I just
at the pass to get through it and you
know he's a qualitative student a
hardcore qualitative student he took the
courses. He loved it; he found it
accessible it was he found that it was
focused on teaching you skills rather
than scaring you with with math or
programming or scaring you with tests
and stuff. It was instead the curriculum
was built to teach you real skills and
to help you learn these skills and this
student came out of it loving methods he
he's writing a qualitative dissertation
but he has a paper a quantitative paper
under review at the best journal of the
discipline and got a revised and resubmit
which is almost unheard of, a single
authored paper by a graduate student in
the APSR and it's got a revise and
resubmit.
That's what we're trying to do here
at Western. We're trying to give you the
most comprehensive training research
training you can get and quantitative
and qualitative methods but we're trying
to do it in a very different way than
then as traditionally done which
actually you know we're not we're trying
to make it as accessible as possible for
you to pick up and learn. You come here
again you'll get great training in
research methods that you can't get you
know it's more difficult to get
elsewhere we also have access to data
here that like I mentioned before about
the Canadian election study there's all
sorts of data here that we had that has
yet to be exploited to be used for
research and so there's exciting
opportunities for MA students and PhD
students to come in and produce
publishable first-class research using
data that hasn't been used yet by
scholars so we're really excited about
providing that opportunity for our
students. Okay so besides that we offer
some other things if you are a graduate
student we try to give you office space
so all all of our MA students get a desk
and office space all of our PhD students
all have desks and offices so that's
great; you'll have a space on campus to
work to leave your stuff to hang out
with other students and talk about ideas.
We offer every year professional
development workshop so professor
Dimitrov is our is our placement
director. His job is to help you develop
skills and help you with the job search
and so he offers a set of workshops
during the year on how do you interview, how
to put together a resume, how do you
maximize conferences, you know how do you
maximize your conference experience, how
do you engage in publishing for the
first time, how do you do teaching and
then another unique thing about our program
is we offer something called the RDTF
the research training and development
fund. It's only for PhD students and we
provide up to $2,500 to PhD students to
collect data basically so if you want to
buy a sample, you want to buy questions
on a survey, you want to go to Rwanda to
do interviews, you want to go to Russia
to visit archives, we can provide you,
depending on
many applications and how much money we
have, we can provide you with up to
$2,500 to do that which i think is a
very unique thing in Canada. We also will
allow you to apply this fund if you want
to additional methods training so you
complete our research sequence and
there's something else you just want to
do that wasn't quite covered by us; you
can apply you know it's offered at
Michigan, Michigan offers a number of
methodological schools, or you want to go to Syracuse or
you want to go to Concordia or want to go to
Wilfird Laurier, all these summer
research summer research methods
teaching institutes we can provide you
money to do that
and so we've done that in the past where
we've used this fund to help students go
do additional methods training. And then
finally you can apply to that fund for
conferences. So sometimes after we pay
people to do data collection, after we
help people do Methods training if
there's money left over we'll give you
money to subsidize your conference
conference participation at the Canadian
Political Science Association or the
American, APSA, the American Political
Science Association. We try to create all
sorts of supports for students to
conduct original research and network. So
let me talk a little now about the two
programs. Our MA program is a one-year
program so we don't have two year
programs. There are two options for doing
an MA program the one which almost all
students do is the first option and it's
the major research paper option so here
you take six half courses so three in
the fall and three in the winter and
then you do a major research paper which
is a 40 to 50 page paper and you you
find a supervisor and thus you work with
the supervisor over the summer to
produce this 40 to 50 page paper and
the MRP can be either a literature
review where you're assessing the literature
and what it says about some sort of
research question and how well does it
answer that research question and what
kind of gaps are to be filled or it can be a piece of
original research so if you want to
write sort of an academic style article
where you have you know a research
question a theory
a method, you collect some data, some original
data, and you, or you use secondary data
and you analyze it and produce some
findings you know test some hypotheses
and produice some findings you can also do
that as well so those are two options
within the major research paper option
that you can pursue. But in both cases
you find a supervisor you work with a
supervisor and you spend the summer
researching and writing that paper. If
you don't want to do that
some students, very few students,
sometimes, we have one every couple of
years that's one give a major thesis and
that involves for half courses you take
three in the fall and one in the winter
1/2 course in the winter term and then
you start in the winter term up until
August you write a 100 page thesis and
it's a much longer deeper investigation
of some controversy in the literature or or
whatever it may be and that's a little
different because then you still work
with a supervisor you still find a
supervisor you have to develop a more
formal proposal and get it approved.
Eventually you have to you defend it
against, it graded by a committee and you
have to orally defend it so it's a bit
more more involved but that option's
available to you. Okay you can also as
part of the MA program you can get a
specialization in one of the four
subfields so if you want to have MA in
political science with a specialization
in Canadian politics on your degree or
transcript you take three courses in
that subfield, so you take three Canadian politics courses and that gives you an MA Specialization in Canadian
politics or three but you know we have
that for all the subfields except for
urban. MA students we typically offer our
all of our we typically offer all of our
MA students with a funding package so
this is not something you apply for we
just offered to you it involves a TA-ship so you're you're gonna be TA for
someone in the fall and winter term. It
comes out to about $13,000
in TA-ship money, around there,
and you're working 140 hours a term to
run tutorials to grade papers, to invigilate exams and midterms. Plus we give
you some scholarship money on top of that.
Typically around four to five thousand
dollars so a typical funding and that's
just money as a scholarship and so that
the total package is around
approximately eighteen thousand dollars
with some variation but we tend to we
try to offer all of our MA students that
at least that basic basic package. We
also as I mentioned before will offer
you some office space so. The PhD program here is a four-year program
and so the requirements are as follows:
you take six half courses in the first
year so you have one required course
which is our research design course and
then five, you take five other courses.
You take, in those five you need to take
a core course in each of your fields, so
you identify 2 fields, so I'm going
to be a Canadian politics person and a
comparative politics person so then you
must take the compare the Canadian core
course, the core course in Canadian
politics, the core course in comparative
politics and then you need to take an
elective in Canadian and elective and
comparative and then you have one free
elective that you can you can take which
we encourage the methods courses. So you
take six half courses and then the
summer you write your comprehensive
exams so what that means is you you so
you've chosen Canadian politics and
comparative politics, you find a
supervisor to help you study for the
exams, so one in Canadian and one
comparative. We give you a list a
Canadian politics reading list and a
comparative politics reading list which
shows all the readings that you are
expected to read and have knowledge of
and you spend all summer working with
your supervisor, sometimes with other
students, to study that list to learn on
that list and study and then in the fall
the fall of year two you write an exam.
It's a six hour exam where you have
three questions, so a six hour exam in
Canadian, a six-hour exam in comparative
each exam has three questions and you
answer these questions. You've six hours to
answer those questions and then a couple
weeks later you orally defend those
questions to your supervisor and other member of the subfield. Once you pass that you're expected to
complete your cognate skill. Your
cognitive skill basically is one
additional methods requirement beyond
the required scope and methods research
design course or it can be a second
language so you can there's different
ways to fulfill that cognate skill but
basically you work with your
dissertation supervisor to figure out
what cognate skill to do. And then you
turn to the dissertation. And you spend
the the fall and winter of year two on
writing a proposal what your - it's a twenty
to twenty-five page document that
outlines what is the research question
what's the literature say, what's your
theory and concepts what's your
hypotheses and methods, what are your data or
cases what do you expect to find you know
you work with your supervisor and your
dissertation committee to put that
together and then you orally defend.
Usually you present it to the public in
the Department to get feedback from
other faculty members and students and
then you defend it with your committee.
And then you're off to do the dissertation. 
Now the dissertation, we actually have
two options the traditional dissertation
which is sort of like a monograph book
you know it's in-depth study of one
research question you know why does X
happen or why does Y happen and as you
know you have five or six or seven or
eight chapters that really hammer away
that question. Or you do it by article or
you do three or four separate studies
but that are tied loosely together so
you might have you know you want to
understand the role of political
information in politics and so you might
have a chapter on political information in
elections or political information on
legislative debates and then another
chapter on political information and
civil society groups. So they'are all
separate studies you know they have
separate research questions separate
maybe even separate data but they all
hang together because there's some broad
theme that brings them together. And so
we offer both these opportunities in our
department. It depends on what you want
to do, it depends on what your supervisor is
comfortable doing. It gives you a lot of
flexibility. You know some people just
want to churn out articles
that are sort of related to each other
and so you can do that in our department.
Some people really want to write like a
book almost style type of project and so
they can do that. You can do either one
of those things here. Now one thing that
I want to note is I want the program our
department is in them in the midst of
trying to change some of these
requirements and so you know if you
apply and you're accepted you know we may
have some new requirements that are slightly
different different than the ones that
are here that's something that we can
you know we can talk about later on if
you apply and if we give you an offer of
admission. By then we should have some
clarity about whether or not these
requirements are gonna change, or soon.
But what we're trying to do is
is provide more give you more
opportunities to train, give you more
opportunities to learn. So that's what
we're looking at in our program changes
is trying to increase the training that
you might get to help you navigate the
job market but also help you publish
better, in better venues and have more
successful publishing. So those are some
things that are coming. But just keep
that in mind; this is the current program
we're hoping to make some changes and
we'll see if we get those through in
time for next year. The University of
Western Ontario provides four years of
guaranteed funding for our PhD students.
It comes with a TA-ship sometimes is can
be an RA-ship so in some years what
we're trying to hope him to do is that
our first year PhD students will start
their first year as RAs, research
assistants for our professors so they'll
get some research experience, maybe some
opportunities for co-authoring but if
that doesn't happen then you will be a
TA as we talked about they'll get TA
money and you'll get a scholarship on
top of that each year for four years
okay. And you know that basic package is
somewhere around $25,000, $26,000
is what
a PhD student can typically expect to
get. Of course you know there are
opportunities and for that to be topped
up through external scholarships but
also you know if you're a highly
competitive student their are also
also some internal scholarships that
exist so especially there's
two that have been created for political
theory students. So if you're a top-notch
political theory student you may be
eligible for the Banard scholarship
which is $15,000 a year,
every year. There's a new one called
the LaSelva scholarship which is $10,000 a year every year for the four
years and this is again for top
performing political theory students. So
there's all sorts of opportunities. We're
very much interested in trying to teach
as much as we can in house you know but
also willing to send you out support you
out to go out and get more training. We
want you to be you have the best
training that's possible and we have a
culture of that in our in our department.
Our graduate students are very supportive
of each other in terms of learning new
methods training they've organized, so we
have a graduate association of political
science students called GAPS.
It's our graduate students, our MA and
PhD students, and they do all sorts of
things, social things, but they also
organize methods, methods meetings so for
instance they they used to meet every
lunch last year and they would
participate in a virtual research method
seminar that would occur and students
would get together, eat lunch, faculty
members would drop by we've watched the
session and talked about talk about what
was what was discussed. This year the
students are running a Bayesian
reading course a course on Bayes so
they're working through a Bayes
statistical textbook themselves. You know
on their own time and helping each other
to learn learn Bayesian logic and
Bayesian inference. And you know the
professor Armstrong has dropped by once
in a while to help answer questions. So
it's like you know it's very exciting if
you want to learn methods training if
you're scared of methods training but
you you know you want to learn it we're
the place to come for that. As I
mentioned there's office space for PhD
students there's the RTDF, funding for
fieldwork or methods training, there's
also all sorts or opportunities for you
to attend professional development
workshops, for you to practice your
presentations so if you have a research
project you're working on you know we
invite students to come and put together
an informal or formal presentations to
the department and you get a chance
to practice that. Some of our students
participate
in CPSA, in the Canadian Political
Science Association meetings or
elsewhere at APSA, and so before they go
we organized a mock conference day where
all the people presenting can practice
as if they were at CPAC or APSA and you
have opportunity opportunity to do that.
Western has a really nice supportive
faculty student culture we are very
interested and very invested in helping
our graduate students at the MA level
and the PhD level succeed. You know we're
trying to do all sorts of things to to
encourage you to succeed to provide you
the opportunities to succeed to learn
skills to build knowledge that's
transferable in the academic or the
non-academic world. There's lots of
faculty student collaborations there's
lots of student-to-student
collaborations. You know people are
self-organizing these these research
things that the graduate students are
doing. It's just great I think if you
know if you came here you'll see that if
you decided to apply and you were
admitted that there's a real supportive
faculty student research culture and
collaborative culture that's present at
Western. Okay so placement outcomes.
This is just a quick list about where we
placed our students there's not an
exhaustive list it's just to show you that
students get jobs. So we've produced
professors in Canada and and UK at
various places people who work for
governments for businesses for interest
groups. So that's for our PhDs. We placed
them in policy jobs and political jobs
and academic placements. We place we are
we are able to place our students in
industry and positions. And same thing with
our MA students they come in for a year
they learn a ton of skills and methods
and they're able to land all sorts of
jobs -  policy jobs, political jobs - some are
some are data scientists, some go on to
law school, lots of opportunities here
Okay well if you have any, if you have
any follow-up questions, again feel free
to contact Teresa McLaughlin at the contact
information on the page about about the
program
or how to apply. If you have any
questions about curriculum I'm happy to
answer your question so you can send me
an email about you know any of your
curriculum type of questions or
substantive questions about the program, what kind of training we do. If you're
interested we can even put you in touch
with some of our students maybe and if
you want to get their perspectives on on
the programs but otherwise thank you
everyone for attending the session. I hope it was
useful and I hope you all apply and we
look forward to receiving your
applications and reviewing them.
