what jobs can I get with a political degree or what career path can I take

Hi,
Good question, a political degree can take you a lot of places...below is a good link with a lot of options:
http://polisci.msu.edu/index.php/undergraduate-program/postgraduate-and-career-opportunities/careers

Also, PS degrees can be used for military or government service, politics of course, as an undergraduate degree for entry into law school and so much more...

Good luck!

Hi Jarrin. I'll give you a high level answer and then the straight-talk answer...

High level answer

Generally speaking, Political Science is a very flexible major. The two most often-cited careers for PoliSci majors are:

• Law (Don't forget that you need to take the LSATs and get into Law School. Also don't forget that half of law students fail to become lawyers - takes a ton of determination and some luck to succeed)


• Government and Politics (e.g., working for local, state, or federal agencies, or working for a political party, organization, or interest group, or political research organization or "think tank")

(Please note that I'm not putting law enforcement on your list because I actually haven't met many political science majors who ended up working in law enforcement. If you want to join the police force, you often don't need a bachelor's degree (depends on your specific location). If you want to join a federal law enforcement agency, you might also want to consider majors including criminal justice as other great routes -- I have no law enforcement experience so my knowledge stops here but you can ask another Question on CareerVillage about that if you are interested in learning further).

The straight-talk answer

Here's the thing that people usually don't talk about: Most political science majors work in business. In fact, if you look at the stats from LinkedIn, 17 out of the top 25 fields for political science majors are in business (admittedly, LinkedIn stats might not reflect the full market if you think that some career fields are disproportionately represented on LinkedIn). Here's a link to the details on that: https://www.linkedin.com/edu/alumni-fos?id=101001&trk=ta-chg-fos and here's a screenshot of the relevant chart:

<img alt="LinkedIn Political Science majors" src="http://i.imgur.com/zG7SfNT.png" title="LinkedIn Political Science Majors">

So what explains this massive overlap? I think part of it must be attributed to a combination of the huge number of students majoring in Political Science and the small number of "natural" career paths for this major. That means that students are spilling out into other career fields, and business is a huge, huge, HUGE field. What does that mean for you? Two things: (1) Getting your degree is a starting point, but it isn't enough. It's a ticket to play, but to succeed you need to stand out from the crowd. (2) If you do find that you want to go into Business (which it doesn't sound like you want) you would need to prepare yourself for the question "If you want to work in business why didn't you just major in business?" Clearly this isn't a problem since so many millions of people have already moved from PoliSci to Business, but it is a super common question nonetheless.

Lastly, I want to take a moment to congratulate you on (1) getting into college, (2) on your hard work to persist in college through the first two years, and (3) being proactive about thinking ahead to what you are going to do with your degree. College a huge opportunity, and it's great that you're trying to make the most of it. Keep on going!

Source for this whole perspective: I was a Political Science major for part of college (although I ended up switching to business half way through) and Jen (my wife and my CareerVillage.org co-founder) majored in Public Policy and has a PhD in Political Science.