The SAGES General Education Requirements include a SAGES departmental seminar, the fourth course in the sequence of SAGES courses, normally taken after students have completed their First Seminar and two University Seminars.  SAGES departmental seminars are limited in enrollment to 17 students, and are seminar-based and writing-intensive.  Departmental seminars are located in a department, can count towards a major, and emphasize common forms of writing and other communication within that department’s discipline.  The Department of Political Science regularly offers SAGES departmental seminars.

Students are not required to take a SAGES departmental seminar in their major.  However, many prefer to do so, because such seminars fulfill not only a SAGES requirement but also count toward the 300-level course requirements for the POSC major.  Our department therefore regularly offers at least two SAGES departmental seminars each semester.  Our goal is to ensure students have a choice of topics as they complete their SAGES requirements (Spring of sophomore year through Fall of senior year).  Because many of our regular courses are seminars, we expect students to view departmental seminars as regular POSC courses, and many of the students will take them out of interest, not to meet a requirement.  It is not unusual for POSC majors to take two or three of our SAGES departmental seminars.

Because we want to ensure that political science majors who wish to fulfill the SAGES departmental seminar requirement with a POSC 300-level designated course can do so, we sometimes establish a permit for enrollment in our SAGES departmental seminars..  For the first week or two of registration, students may need to request permission from the instructor in order to register for the course; thereafter, any student may register.  This allows us to give priority to POSC majors who need the course to meet their general education requirements.

The Department of Political Science is offering three SAGES departmental seminars in Fall 2020: POSC346 Women, Power, and Politics (Professor Beckwith; POSC349 Research Methods in Political Science (Professor Buchler); and POSC378 International Relations Theory (Professor Kathryn Lavelle).