Jobs for the Major
How this major affects a job search
International relations is a pretty specific major. You're being groomed to enter a particular career field. No worrying about what you'll do after college, right?
Well, not exactly. Like most humanities graduates, you're probably going to have a tough time when you first leave school. There are not a lot of job openings for IR people, especially not fresh-faced college grads. You're going to want a nice, polished resume by the time you leave school. Get some internships and a couple of nice letters of recommendation from your best professors, and hopefully you'll be able to land a post-grad internship.
We hope you like fetching Starbucks, because you'll probably be getting a lot of experience doing that…for a while.
The flip side of all this is that once you manage to park your butt in a comfy Washington swivel chair, you probably won't be going anywhere for a while. Nobody's going to be in a hurry to get rid of a good diplomat. Stick it out and you could find yourself set for a good long while.
If you take a stab at Capitol Hill and decide that it's not the life for you, don't fret. IR graduates have a whole slew of marketable skills that can be transferred across professions. By the time you've got that degree, you'll have been trained in critical thinking, research and analysis, communication, negotiation, investigation, and teleportation.
Okay, maybe not that last one. But the ability to wrestle with a problem and come up with a brilliant, everybody-wins solution is something that no potential employer is going to turn down.
Common Career Fields
Diplomat (Master's degree encouraged). This is the field that most IR majors want to go into. The U.S. Foreign Service sends about 8,000 people to American embassies across the globe, and they also keep some at home for the State Department and the United States Information Agency. Your job as a diplomat will be to develop foreign policy, negotiate with other countries in the name of the U.S., and read literally thousands of policymaking documents in between sitting through hundreds of meetings. If you like playing the long game (we're looking at you, chess champs), then diplomacy is definitely the gig for you.
International Businessperson (business degree required). Do you like the sound of the words ''global empire''? Say it a few times in your best Morgan Freeman voice. Gloooobal emmmpiiiirre. Mmm. If you're a savvy sales(wo)man with a perfectly pressed power suit and an international relations degree under your belt, then the world is your oyster. Or it will be, after a lot of hard work and a secondary degree in business. Sure, you'll have to spend a bit more time in school, but when you successfully introduce cinnamon buns to Australia and make your first million, you'll be able to pay it back in full.
Peace Corps Worker. Want to see the world and make it a better place at the same time? The Peace Corps offers some paying administrative positions alongside its volunteer ones. You can be a program director, a training officer, or a country director, which is basically the head honcho of a Peace Corps program in a particular country. It's the country director's job to sort out what the Peace Corps will be doing in that place and then oversee the process and make sure it gets done. The only downside to this is that it has a term limit of thirty months, so after two and a half years you're back out hunting for a job with nothing but memories to keep you warm at night.
University Professor (PhD required). They say those who can't do, teach, but we think that's a bit rude. If getting a PhD and educating the next several generations of leaders was easy, everyone would do it. And if working for the government isn't your jam, but you still want to think about IR on a complex level every day, then you should seriously consider pursuing a PhD and a university position. It's a long, hard road, but tenure is nothing to sneeze at. Plus, you'll be paid to think about international relations and share your passion for it with your students, who may well go on to become wildly successful and famous and give you all the credit. What could be better?
Spy (secondary degree required). Get your suit, get your gun, and practice ordering shaken (not stirred) martinis. While you're at it, get a secondary degree in psychology or a STEM field such as computer science, engineering, or advanced mathematics. The CIA and the NSA are always on the lookout for potential analysts or covert operators—people who know about how foreign countries work and who can help them gather and/or decode potentially critical information. An intelligence career, whether it's as an analyst or an operative, is almost always a desk job of some sort, though…so if you want to be the next James Bond, you're out of luck. Though, really, how good of a spy can James Bond be? Everything he's ever done has been caught on film and seen by millions.
Translator and/or Interpreter. It's a new, globalized world, with countries importing and exporting everything from tech to political ideologies to each other left, right, and center. Someone's got to translate all those legal documents, bestselling novels, and car advertisements. Somebody's got to be the go-between in those multimillion board room meetings. Being a translator or interpreter means not only knowing the language, but also the culture. If you aren't well-versed in both, you're going to find yourself in the same kind of awkward situation that Gerber (whose logo is a cute baby) did when they started selling their baby food in Africa. They didn't realize that many food cans in Africa have pictures of their contents on them. Whoopsy daisy.
United Nations Staff Member (Master's required). Being a UN staff member is like being an International Relations rock star. The organization has dozens of sublevels that specialize in everything from public health to economic development. As a UN staff member, you'll get to represent your country in a clean, safe, and highly respected environment. The only catch is that because each country needs to be represented by its citizens, there are only a handful of positions open to Americans, most of which are already filled.
Current unemployment of the major
7%Percentage of majors who get a higher degree after college
47%Stats obtained from this source.