Cohort and Career: Cross-Class Bonds and Foreign Policy Professional Development

A key purpose of political science education is to prepare students for the workforce. The politics career development “hidden curriculum”—as demonstrated by successful practitioners—has two individually necessary but jointly sufficient components: credible skills and credible networks. As teachers of politics, we must enable our students to build and leverage both. This paper focuses on the value of cohorts, groups of students connected through their shared experience in a class over time that enable networking based on class-taught skills to identify early career opportunities.