hi, I recently enrolled at Excelsior after a 10 year hiatus from college. I plan to finish my BA in Political Science and then continue on to graduate school. My career goals are not clear yet, but I may decide to enter into a PhD program. I'd be interested to hear from others on this forum what their experience has been when applying to graduate school (preferably in Liberal Arts) after earning a DL undergraduate degree. How did you demonstrate research skills? Were you able to get letters of recommendation from your DL instructors? Did you do work outside the DL courses to prepare? Interships? etc. thanks very much, -- James
DL UG TO BM GS? Sorry, my UG is mere humble B&M. But there have been a couple of recent threads addressing your question here. http://forums.degreeinfo.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=19871 http://forums.degreeinfo.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=19841 No doubt there are similar threads in the archives, BUT THE SEARCH FUNCTION SEEMS A BIT CLUNKY OF LATE!!! Oh, by the way! Congratulations on having the good taste to choose a political science degree!
I did not have trouble getting letters of recommendation from DL instructors. I think your chances improve in web courses and those where you communicate with the instructor via email, message board, telephone etc instead of paper based correspondence courses where you may never contact the instructor. One approach might be to meet your upper level political science course requirements from one DL program such as LSU or BYU to become more familiar with the instructors there (I doubt Excelsior will offer all the courses for the political science major). And as far as demonstrating research skills, you will most likely have an upper level course paper that will meet the requirement. In many cases the requirement is a writing sample such as final paper or a personal statement. The major factors for graduate admissions are often 1. GPA 2. GRE Score 3. Letters of Recommendation. The best preparation for graduate school is to do well in your undergraduate major courses and study hard for the GRE. Excelsior will get you to graduate school as well as most other schools in most cases. If you go to the Excelsior website and review the alumni magazine you will see that quite a few graduates go on to earn masters and/or doctorates.
1. By all means, keep that GPA up. On the other hand, even if you do get some less than wonderful grades, there are still many grad schools that have academic forgiveness policies. 2. I happen to have scored in the 80th percentile for my GRE General Test, the 93rd percentile on my GRE Subject Test in History, and the 93rd percentile on my GRE Subject Test in Political Science having walked in cold turkey. So the best preparation there may just be to do well in your classes. On the other hand there are books and classes on how to take ther GRE by Kaplan and Princeton Review and such like and if these help, by all means, go for it. 3. Good recommendations are crucial to grad school admissions. So call your professor on the phone during his/her office hours, email him/her, etc. Make yourself known - and memorable as one of his/her better students. 4. Actually my experience has been that grad school admissions requires both the term paper and the personal statement. You would also be well advised to keep a file of old term papers just in case you either (a) decide not to go to grad school immediately or else (b) you wash with a brain tumor or something on your first go-round with grad school and need to try to bash your way back into grad school years later. That way, your profs will be better able to remember you years later if you accompany requests for fresh recommendations with term papers written for their classes.
Great stuff. Thanks for all the feedback. To be honest, I'm not sure what my GPA is at this point, as I bounced around between 3 different schools when I was originally in college 10-12 years ago. I'll find out when Excelsior finishes figuring out what credits they'll transfer in. But I hadn't taken very many Political Science classes back then, so all of that work will be done via DL. I'm guessing the grad schools will weight the recent coursework more heavily than the work I did 10+ years ago (at least I hope so!). I'll take a look at some of the courses offered at some of the other DL programs. It doesn't look like I have access to the DistanceLearn search system yet. Presumably that happens after they finish processing my transcripts too. thanks for your help, -- James
Many schools do take the older grades magna cum granis salis (with a big grain of salt), especially if you've shown substantial improvement since then. As to grad school, you don't say whether you prefer DL or B&M. If you'd consider DL, there is an MA in Political Science at American Military University (www.apus.edu), an MSS in Political Science at Syracuse University (www.yesu.syr.edu), and an MA in Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (www.vt.edu). Hey, if Syracuse and Virginia Tech tell you you're not prestigious enough because of a few ten-year-old bad grades, American Military University is still a pretty good school. There are no DL PhD in Political Science programs in the United States, so far as I know; however, there are a few good British-system (dissertation-only) PhD programs in Political Science available at the University of Melbourne (www.unimelb.edu.au), the University of Luton (www.luton.ac.uk), and South Bank University (www.lbsu.ac.uk).
Troy University's DL M.S. in International Relations is also a political science program. All the courses are "POL" with the exception of a military history course.
