This article is part of our general graduate school advice, complementing our in-depth, degree-specific guides on policy master’s programs and law school.

This article is most relevant for current undergraduates or recent graduates. If you’re more advanced in your career, a policy graduate degree can still be a useful (and perhaps the only) way to immediately pivot into policy jobs.

The case for working before graduate school

Our general advice is for most undergraduates to work for 1-3 years for career exploration and professional development purposes before starting a policy graduate degree (such as a policy master’s or law degree). This is for a few reasons. 

Most importantly, it’s preferable to explore career options before graduate school rather than after. A graduate degree can be expensive (in terms of both time and money), so you’ll want to make sure going to graduate school is the right choice and that you’re getting the right degree. It’s a common pitfall for people to take the path of least resistance and go to graduate school right after college having little idea what they want to work on longer-term. Graduate school can be a useful “career reset” after which employers care less about whether you worked on unrelated things previously. This makes exploration before graduate school preferable to after since it is less likely to harm your future job chances.

Having some prior real-world experience likely also makes the graduate degree more valuable, as it helps you to understand how what you learn in classes relates to the topics and work you are interested in.

Finally, gaining career experience can make you a more competitive graduate school applicant. Consider policy master’s programs, for example: While policy schools generally aren’t extremely competitive and accept some high-achieving students straight out of undergrad¹, the average policy master’s student is around 26 years old and has ~3 years of work experience.² Similarly for law degrees, most students work somewhere between two and four years before starting law school. For example, in the 2022 admitted class at Harvard Law School, 78% of students were at least one year out of college and 65% were two or more years out of college (but only 21% of applicants were more than four years out of college). 

Having (relevant) career experience can compensate to some extent for worse undergraduate grades, worse admissions test results, and a lack of relevant extracurriculars. More competitive applicants also have a higher chance of getting (more generous) financial aid. Relatedly, having more work experience before your master’s degree can open up more valuable opportunities in or alongside graduate school, such as research assistant positions or better internships. 

To explore the policy domain and professionally develop, many college graduates should (try to) do a few relevant internships, fellowships, or early-career jobs before going to graduate school. For example, you might try to get work experience in Congress (e.g. via internships), think tanks, in the executive branch, or in policy-related private sector roles.³ You should also consider policy fellowship that are open to or specifically targeted at recent college graduates, such as the Horizon Fellowship⁴ (junior think tank track), the STPI Science Policy Fellowship, the TechCongress Congressional Innovation Fellowship, or the Scoville Peace Fellowship.

Exceptions: Who should do graduate school immediately?

Despite the general advice above, starting a graduate degree right after college may make sense, depending on your circumstances. This case is stronger the more of the following conditions apply: 

1. You’ve worked in another field for several years and need a way to pivot into the policy world. Some people are too senior professionally for junior policy jobs to make sense, while being too inexperienced to qualify for mid-level policy roles. For example, if you’ve been a software engineer for several years and have led teams, starting in policy with an entry-level internship wouldn’t make sense. Pivoting through a graduate degree program may be the only option for someone in this situation. 
2. You’re confident you want to work in policy, so further exploration is less valuable. This is more likely if you have (1) tested your fit for policy work during or before college, such as through relevant internships or extracurriculars, (2) completed (and thrived in) a policy-relevant undergraduate degree, (3) seriously considered and (tentatively) rejected your main alternatives to policy work, and (4) connected with policy professionals and understand (and would enjoy) their work. 
3. You immediately get an offer from your top graduate school option, so you don’t need to get more experience to become a competitive applicant. This is not a decisive reason to do a graduate degree immediately, but if you don’t get accepted for your top option and think you might get it in 1-2 years with some additional experience, this can be a strong reason for delaying.
4. You can’t get relevant policy work experience without a graduate degree. Many DC policy jobs and even internships are quite competitive, especially at important institutions such as Congress, federal agencies, or well-known think tanks.⁵ This is especially true if you don’t have prior policy experience (such as relevant undergraduate classes, internships, or extracurriculars). If you struggle to get valuable policy opportunities but could get into a good graduate degree, it can make sense to start graduate school soon after undergrad.⁶
5. You can do a relevant 5-year accelerated master’s degree, reducing the cost of graduate school. Some policy schools like Georgetown University offer combined bachelor’s plus master’s degrees taking only 5 years to complete (instead of the usual 6 years for a 4-year bachelor’s and 2-year master’s degree). If you have this opportunity at your college, it may make sense to do it. But beware of the potential downsides: First, it could be better to do a top 2-year policy master’s (especially in DC) than to do an accelerated degree if the accelerated degree is not as relevant or high quality. Second, graduate school is a great opportunity for professional development, which you may get to do less of in a 1-year master’s than a 2-year master’s. Third, a five-year degree makes you more likely to remain in the social scene of undergraduate life and get fewer of the networking benefits from a 2-year master’s. At the same time, you should weigh this against the potential time and monetary costs of graduate school.
6. You expect limited near-term job opportunities in your party’s policy ecosystem. For people with strong partisan affiliations interested in more partisan roles (e.g. congressional staff, executive branch appointments), job opportunities and advancement often wane when their party is out of power. In these cases, graduate school can serve as a productive investment during a period of slower career progression, helping you build skills, credentials, and networks for future opportunities.

Applying early

Even if you plan to work for 1-3 years before graduate school, it can make sense to apply early to a few top options (e.g. during your last year in undergrad or one year out of college), unless you’re highly confident you won’t accept any offers.

Repeat applications generally don’t seem to hurt your chances and applying early to a few top options has several advantages, including the possibility of deferral, getting information about your competitiveness, frontloading application work, additional chances in semi-random admissions processes, and greater ease of getting references from college professors. 

But you should balance the above arguments with the costs of applying. Applying for grad school can be very costly considering the time taken to compile writing samples, take standardized tests, contact references, and of course the application fee itself. If your chances of accepting an offer for the coming year are low enough, then it wouldn’t be worth this up-front cost. An additional downside of applying early is that it may encourage taking the path of least resistance if you get accepted—accepting the offer and beginning graduate school earlier than is ideal—instead of taking the more uncertain but higher-impact path of exploring work options first.

Footnotes

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