The Woodrow Wilson School is a multidisciplinary major in which each student, in consultation with the director, creates an individual program of study that combines techniques of analysis from the social science disciplines and courses that give the student substantive depth in a particular policy area.

Concentrators must take a minimum of eight departmental courses to graduate. A departmental course is one that can be used to meet a WWS requirement. All courses used to meet requirements must be graded. Except for courses used to meet the ethics and the methods requirements, all courses must also be 300-level or above and be designated or cross-listed as ECO, HIS, POL, PSY, SOC or WWS in the semester in which they were taken; courses recognized by other departments as cognates but not listed this way cannot be used to meet requirements. Upper-level courses taken during a semester abroad may, with approval, be used to meet the disciplinary, distribution or ethics requirement.

The WWS course requirements are as follows:

Class of 2012

WWS concentrators and certificate students must enroll in a WWS policy task force or policy conference each semester of their junior year. Concentrators receive credit for their junior independent work in the task forces and policy conferences; certificate students receive course credit.

Concentrators must do a senior thesis in WWS on a significant issue in public and international affairs. Certificate students may fulfill their WWS senior thesis requirement in the same way or by doing a thesis in their home department that has a substantial component concerned with public or international affairs.

WWS concentrators should take several courses that focus their course of study and provide substantive background for their eventual senior thesis topic, and should choose to take at least three courses in the primary discipline they plan to use in the analysis of their thesis topic.

The School's curriculum is an interdisciplinary program consisting chiefly of courses from the social sciences. In addition to a task force and a policy research seminar, each student will be required to take core courses and to complete a set number of courses in one of a choice of policy clusters.

For Woodrow Wilson School concentrators, the task forces and policy research seminars fulfill the University's junior independent work requirement. The senior thesis constitutes the independent work of the senior year. The senior thesis is a scholarly paper related to the subject in public or international affairs that is of greatest interest to the student. Based on extensive research, it is the major project of the senior year.