Taken AY2014/2015 Semester 2
PS2237: Introduction to International Relations
I’d already had misgivings regarding IR before taking this module, but I heard that the lecturer was a world-famous constructivist and therefore I took this module. I came to regret it, however, because I struggled with understanding the content and the copious amount of long readings that we had to digest.
The lecturer is very smart and funny, and is a generally cool guy. However, lectures felt like they were pitched at a higher level, and seemed to miss out important information that we were probably assumed to already know and understand. I was left feeling lost for a good part of the semester, and the readings themselves were difficult to get through and often difficult to understand or internalize. However, for this module, the readings are imperative to your understanding and foundation of IR, especially if you can’t follow the lectures. Let it not be said that the lecturer is not a flexible guy, though – he asked for our feedback, and decided that he would provide slides next time so that students would be able to follow his lectures better, and he even removed the readings that we feedbacked were boring and/or terrible.
He’s also a really nice guy, because he provides possible exam questions for both the midterms and finals, about 10-11 questions each. This allows you some time to prepare, and it is very advisable to split up the workload with some friends and prepare your answers together. He would also come up with very difficult questions as part of that question list, only to actually give the easier questions on the day itself. This saved my grade immensely, because I had no idea what was going on for topics such as the global commons, nuclear deterrence and the list goes on (I’m actually shocked at how little of the content I’m able to process). To be fair, I did understand somewhat, but it was next to impossible to write a decent essay on it, especially when the essay in question was so hard! Thankfully, those questions didn’t come out for the exams.
Assessment: There is tutorial participation (10%), midterms (20%), two 900-word essays (15% each) and finals (40%). This is really a lot of components for assessment.
We were required to do two 900-word essays out of four, over the span of the semester. He would provide this list of four at the very start, and provide deadlines for each so that the work would be more evenly spaced out. With that said, these essays were very closely linked to the readings, and you definitely need to do the relevant readings in order to make a decent attempt at writing these essays. It was extremely difficult to be so succinct, since 900 words isn’t actually a lot.
For midterms, he gave us the entire lecture slot to do one essay, which was great because that was more than enough time. I find that there is a tendency to do better for midterms if one writes more pages – if that means you write more actual, legit content (not fluffing). One must be careful to identify what the question is asking for though (for example, whether it’s talking about realism, liberalism, or both) because it’s easy to lose many marks in this area.
Workload: The workload was definitely heavy, and it’s impossible to read all the readings (although I think some ambitious students managed that). The earlier readings are quite foundational, however, and usually they’re discussed during tutorials, so you would do well to read them. This module was very torturous for me, because I strongly disliked IR, but on a whole, I must say that it eventually turned out okay.
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