Courses are conducted as seminars and typically have small enrollments. Students are required to pass fourteen term courses during their first two years in the program, and receive a grade of Honors in at least two of them. Two of the courses may be in Departments other than Political Science. Although the Department imposes no fixed distribution of courses by semester, students are normally expected to complete seven courses in the first year. Each student must demonstrate competence in three of the seven fields by the beginning of the third year.
Competence is demonstrated by passing the comprehensive examination in the field.
Proposals for such fields will normally include a reading list and an identification of one or more courses to be taken by the student. During the second year of courses, all students are required to take the two-term course in Research and Writing, which is devoted to the preparation of a manuscript based on original research on a topic of the student's choice. Students are also required to take as one of their fourteen courses a one-semester course in statistical methods, successful completion of which satisfies the statistics requirements. In the Fall term of the student's third year, each student takes the Dissertation Prospectus seminar. To receive credit for the course a student must submit a dissertation prospectus that is approved by the seminar instructor and the student's dissertation advisor.