Student Research and Prizes
Students in the Political Science Department are strongly encouraged to pursue research opportunities during their time at Swarthmore.
Some students engage in their own independent research (often in the form of a senior thesis), with the help of faculty and mentors. To acknowledge particularly strong independent research of this kind, the Department annually awards the Judith Polgar Ruchkin Prize, given to a junior or senior that writes the most outstanding piece of scholarship during that academic year.
Students, especially those considering graduate school, are also encouraged to revise their best work and submit these papers to one of the many undergraduate political science journals around the country. Whether they are writing a normal class paper or working on a more ambitious thesis project, students may want to consult the TriCo Political Science Research Guide page, a particularly useful resource for finding data, sources, and other information.
Students interested in resources and funding to attend conferences can read more here.
Those students interested in pursuing independent research over the summer may also want to look into applying for a research grant from the Social Sciences Division. We encourage students to look into the Pennock Fellowship for consideration. The J. Roland Pennock Undergraduate Fellowship in Public Affairs provides a grant to support a substantial research project in public affairs. This Fellowship is awarded for a program of off-campus research in public affairs in which observation, interviews, or other forms of inquiry beyond the library play an important role.
Other students may engage in collaborative research with a faculty remember, often while working as a research assistant. Some examples of recent collaborative projects are listed below:
- In recent years, Professor Carol Nackenoff has co-authored a chapter every year with a student research assistant for an annually published book on that year's major Supreme Court decisions. Recent collaborators have been Natasha Markov-Riss '20 ("McGirt v. Oklahoma: On Native Rights"), Alison Diebold '20 (“Rucho v. Common Cause on Partisan Gerrymandering and the Political Questions Doctrine”), Gilbert Orbea '19 ("Justice Neil Gorsuch Joins the Court"), and Allison Hrabar '16 ("Quaker Roles in Making and Implementing Federal Indian Policy: From Grant’s Peace Policy through the Early Dawes Act Era (1869-1900)”)
