Advice on applying to international relations masters programs?

[irgrad123]

I'm looking at applying to international relations masters programs in the next couple of years. I'm aiming high (my top two are Georgetown and Harvard), but I recognize it's a long shot at the moment and hoping I could get some insight on what I could do to make myself competitive!

Some background: I graduated with a bachelor's in international relations from a large, well-known state school last year. My cumulative GPA was a 3.49 - okay, but not great, because I was in a very regimented ROTC program (something like a military service academy within a larger university) that took up 5-6 hours of my time daily on an easy day. I did a fair amount of volunteer work as well, but nothing relevant to the international relations field. I took a lot of Russian language courses as well, got borderline proficient in it, and actually spent some time living abroad in former Soviet countries. I didn't do any research, didn't have any outstanding relationships with professors, etc. - I cared about my grades, but my main focus was the military side of things.

I'm currently about to graduate from flight school as a pilot. Because of that, I still have a couple of years before I can even think about applying to grad programs, but I wanted to get an early idea of what I could do to boost my chances when the time comes. My plan now basically consists of boosting my Russian skills and taking whatever exams are necessary to improve it (definitely lost some of the language capacity since graduating) and working hard to score well on the GRE/GMAT/whatever they want me to take when the time comes.

Any advice on things I could do beyond that? Thank you in advance for your help!