The department's sophisticated and flexible graduate training prepares its students to compete for the country's top academic positions and postdoctoral fellowships, as well as careers in the private sector, non-profit organizations, and government. Supplementing the guidance of your dissertation committee, the department offers numerous resources for preparing graduate students for the job market. The director of placement schedules faculty-led professionalization workshops throughout the year on key topics like academic publishing, crafting application letters, and the hiring process. The department has a long history of hosting practice job talks, where students entering the academic job market receive critical feedback and advice from faculty and peers.
The University's UChicagoGRAD offers a robust program of events and workshops designed to help students discern career paths and to help with career development.
Since 2000, 85 percent of our graduates secured jobs in universities and colleges both at home and abroad. Sixty percent of these graduates acquired tenure-track positions, two thirds of whom were in first-tier research institutions. The remaining fifteen percent of our graduates took positions in the government or private sector. Roughly three quarters of our students successfully complete the doctoral program.
Here are some of the institutions where our recent graduates are serving in tenure track positions:
Amherst College
Bard College
Boston College
Bryn Mawr College
Colgate University
College of William and Mary
Cornell University
Freie Universitat
George Mason University
George Washington University
Georgetown University
Georgia Tech
Harvard University
Johns Hopkins University
London School of Economics
Loyola Marymount University
McGill University
Miami of Ohio University
Middlebury College
Monterrey Institute of Technology
Naval Postgraduate School
Northwestern University
Oberlin College
Occidental College
Ohio State University
Pennsylvania State University
Reed College
SASS Maxwell AFB
Scripps College
St. Lawrence Univ.
Texas A & M
The New School
Tufts University
University of California, Los Angeles
University of Cambridge
University of Chicago Law School
University of Oklahoma College of Law
University of Oregon
University of Oxford
University of Pennsylvania
University of San Francisco
University of Sydney
University of Texas, Austin
University of Wisconsin, Madison
US Naval War College
Vanderbilt University
Williams College
Yale University
Many of our graduates begin their academic careers with postdoctoral fellowships. Recent graduates have acquired post-docs at Virginia, Duke, Indiana, Illinois, Harvard, Notre Dame, Pennsylvania, Yale, Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, Rutgers, Berkeley, Brown, Michigan, Wake Forest, Princeton, Chicago, Washington University, and the European Union Institute. A few of our graduates have served as fellows through the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the APSA Congressional Fellowship Program.
For a more detailed placement history, please see here.