Hello everyone,
Great forum, very interesting and informative posts. I am a student at Tufts University in Boston, USA, and was just accepted to the MSc International Politics at SOAS.
I wanted to know if anyone had any thoughts about the program. Specifically I wanted to know whether it would be a good program to choose if I wanted to pursue a Phd further down the line - that is to say, would it be considered an equivalent to a more formal 'comparative politics' program from other schools.
I'm also waiting to hear back from LSE, where I applied for MSc Comparative Politics (democracy). I'm keen on visiting the two campuses in March (during my spring break) to look around the schools and get a feel for them.
--> Does anyone have any initial thoughts about the two programs (SOAS Intl. Politics vs. LSE Comparative Politics), ie. how they would match up against each other, prospects for Phd work afterwards (assuming I do well in either!), student body, location, etc.
I'm torn, because I grew up in Southeast Asia and would like to focus on the politics of the region. SOAS is obviously the 'specialist' school, but looking at the prospectus it seems like they don't have as many political scientists as they do linguists, historians or anthropologists specializing in the region. LSE on the other hand seems to have a larger and more comprehensive political science faculty, and could provide maybe the more comprehensive 'political science' education. They also have one superstar Southeast Asian politics professor (John Sidel) that I would look forward to taking a class with.
Sorry if this post was long - so many questions!