POL Major and Minor Requirements

Declaring POL as a major or minor is easy. All you need to do is complete a form at the Center for Freshman Advising (Ashe 112), or in the Office of Student Academic Services (Ashe 200). You do not need a signature from anybody in the POL department to complete this process.

Requirements For Majors

1. 30 credits are required for the POL major
2. At least 21 of these credits must be taken in residence.
3. All courses must be passed with a grade of C- or above with an overall GPA of 2.0 or above.

All majors must take the department’s three introductory courses POL 20, POL202, and POL203 (9 credits). The remaining courses must include classes taken at the 300 level or above from at least three of five sub-fields of political science: Political Theory and Methods, American Politics, International Relations, Comparative Politics, and Public Policy, Administration and Law. All majors must also complete two 500-level seminars (6 credits). Note that 500-level seminars may fulfill the sub-field requirements.

All majors must complete a quiz for graduating seniors (to be used for assessment purposes) during their last semester of coursework.

To satisfy the Advanced Writing & Communication proficiency requirement, students majoring in political science must complete at least one of the four required writing-intensive courses in the Department of Political Science.

Political Science Minor (BA) Requirements

15 credits are required, at least 9 of which must be taken in residence. At least one course must be taken from among the department’s introductory sequence (POL201, POL202, POL203). All courses must be passed with a grade of C- or above.

Detailed Requirements For Current Majors and Courses By Subfield

1. POL 201 Introduction to American National Government
2. POL 202 Introduction to Comparative Politics
3. POL 203 Introduction to International Relations
   

The Remaining Credits Must Meet The Following Distributional Requirements:

500-Level Seminar Requirement:

Six of the credits must come from two 500-level seminar courses offered by the University of Miami. This includes any 500-level seminar offered by the Department of Political Science or cross-listed with Political Science. The following 500 level courses are not seminars and do not fulfill this requirement:

1. POL 520 Internship
2. POL 521 Public Affairs Internship
3. POL 563 Senior Honors Thesis (I)
4. POL 564 Senior Honors Thesis (II)
5. POL 589 Directed Research
6. POL 590 Directed Readings

Subfield Requirement:

At least one course above the 200-level must be taken in three of the following five principal sub-fields of political science:

1. American Politics
2. Comparative Politics
3. International Relations
4. Public Administration, Policy, and Law
5. Political Theory and Methods

These can include courses used to fulfill used to fulfill the 500-level seminar requirement.

For the purposes of fulfilling these distribution requirements, sub-fields are defined as follows; note that some courses cover more than one sub-field but students may not use a single class to fill two sub-field requirements.