Political science looks at how power is
distributed in a society. It looks at
systems of government and how decisions
are made and how these decisions affect
people. By studying political science for
me as a person who was born in the
Middle East, I wanted to put my efforts
to contribute to ways of improving the
world or working on the issues that many
people suffer.
I think one big fear that
a lot of people have when they're going
through something like a political
science degree is what am I going to do
with it when I'm done. I had quite a few
work opportunities come up as a result
of working through UVic at a graduate
level. One of the things that I did was
working for the Snowden surveillance
archive. I spent some time working for
the Privacy Commissioner British Columbia.
One of the best hands-on
opportunities that I had to explore
political science was my co-op
experience. I worked for 8 months at the
Ministry of Environment and Climate
Change Strategy and I got to help
develop species at risk legislation for
the province
As a political scientist one of the jobs
that we do is we have to translate
complex theories involving things like
climate change and ecosystem management
and bring it into a policy setting that
is actually translatable and
implementable so that the public can
understand it and so that our political
actors can understand it as well.
So I think for anybody who's interested in
really compelling questions around
sustainability creativity and community
engagement UVic truly is a wonderful
place to start thinking about and
learning in that way.
