Predoctoral Summer Institute

The Predoctoral Summer Institute (PSI) is held at Georgetown University. Approximately 20 rising juniors and seniors attending college/university in Washington, DC, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia, many of whom are under-represented minorities, attend the Institute. The PSI has four overarching practical objectives: providing accessible and engaging overviews of the subfields and methods of the political science discipline; encouraging participants to conduct research and envision themselves as researchers; demystifying the processes of applying to graduate programs and pursuing a graduate degree; and elucidating the career paths open to graduates of doctoral programs in political science. In pursuing these practical objectives, PSI aims to accomplish two broader goals: empowering diverse cohorts of participants studying myriad pressing political topics to advance innovative research in new sites, using new methods, developing new theories, and generating actionable findings; and enhancing the diversity of the backgrounds and perspectives of the student population in political science graduate education, thereby contributing to creating a more diverse, globally competitive STEM workforce. PSI supports student participants to successfully apply to graduate school and provides them with the tools to excel in their graduate programs. The Institute thus contributes to broadening, deepening, and strengthening the pool of students applying to graduate programs, to boosting the acceptance rate of underrepresented students, and to augmenting the participation of historically underrepresented groups in STEM – thereby fostering intellectual progress. Moreover, the systematic evaluation of the program allows advances in knowledge about key barriers to graduate education for students from historically underrepresented backgrounds; and the development of strategies and best practices for supporting students from these backgrounds, and for designing and scaling such initiatives across institutions, regions, and disciplines. This knowledge, in turn, will form a robust foundation for the development of evidence-led interventions aimed at enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the academy. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.