Please Help Me Decide: Oxford Vs. Harvard

[mppgal55]

If you have good enough LSAT scores and are planning on going to law school in the US, I'd do Oxford now and Harvard for law school. Best of both worlds!

[eucalyptus]

I don't actually know anything about IR so I'm not sure if this is relevant, but I did my Masters at St Andrews, which also has a pretty famous IR program. I'm not sure if they're considered to be in the same league with Oxford though. At St Andrews, I made friends with lots of people in the IR program and they all universally agreed that the degree is a bit of a joke. Anyone with any IR experience in undergrad found the classes really easy, and even those that didn't found them less challenging than their undergrad programs. That's not to say they weren't learning anything - they were, it just wasn't particularly rigorous and they clearly could have been learning much, much more. They seemed to have a ridiculous amount of free time, too. Anyway, many of them have now gone on to good IR-related jobs around the world, so clearly the program was good in terms of placing people and affording job opportunities. However, in terms of learning skills and content, it was pretty lame. Importantly, I found this to be a shared feature among St Andrews 1-year Masters programs: all my friends (in IR, Marketing, Psychology, etc) said it was much easier and less work than their undergrads, and that anyone with an undergraduate education in the subject would be repeating a lot of material and find it exceptionally easy. Those 1-year Masters programs that attract a lot of international students do so because the school earns tons of money off them, not because they're such amazing programs. Anyway, I have no idea if Oxford's IR program would be similar (and in fact that might seem like a ridiculous question to someone in the field), but it's worth considering, since St Andrews seemed to have quite the reputation as well.