Washington D.C. Off-Campus Program

Applications for the Spring 2026 Washinton, D.C. program open on October 1st, 2024 and close on February 1st, 2025.

All applicants will be interviewed by the Program Director and students will be notified of their acceptance in March.

To apply for the program, click on the website for the Frank J. Guarini Institute for International Education

Frequently Asked Questions

A key component of the DC program is interning in an organization related to politics in Washington, D.C. The objective of the independent study is to view the internship as an experiential learning opportunity that complements your academic and intellectual development. Govt 93 requires weekly logs in which you will relate your work experience to the other two classes and to broader issues in political science. This course counts as a mid-level course and is pass/fail.

This course will analyze the history of the United States in the 20^th and 21^st centuries by examining competing theoretical perspectives that explain the emergence, evolution, and impact of a range of social movements. Students will produce a research paper on a movement of their choosing.

This course examines the degree to which human rights shapes U.S. foreign policy and vice versa. We begin by studying the role that the United States played in shaping the status of human rights concerns in the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the history of U.S. efforts to draft and ratify the other UN human rights treaties. We analyze the participation of the U.S. government in various human rights venues within the United Nations, taking various ideological perspectives into account, and we will study scholarly research that assesses the effectiveness of international human rights law in protecting human rights.