Graduate students at Indiana have won a variety of prestigious awards for their dissertations, including a British Politics Group award, an American Association for the Study of Higher Education award, and numerous APSA awards. Students have also received Fulbright Fellowships, Brookings Fellowships, Social Science Research Council Fellowships, International Research Exchange Fellowships, and National Science Foundation grants for support of dissertation research in the Unites States and abroad. All graduate students are members of the Political Science Graduate Student Assocation. The association elects a five-member executive committee, as well as a representative to serve on the Graduate Advisory Committee. This committee formulates proposals concerning the graduate program for approval of the entire faculty.
Graduate students serve on most departmental committees.
The department receives more than 200 applications for graduate study each year, and aims to enroll the fifteen or so most talented and promising young scholars. The department is committed to the fullest possible development of the scholarly and professional potential of each graduate student. To this end, the graduate program offers comprehensive coverage of the major fields in political science, in-depth training in a wide variety of theoretical and methodological approaches used in the discipline, and opportunities for independent and original research. Professional teaching preparation is another important feature of the graduate program.