International Governance and Diplomacy @ SciencesPo - Advice needed!
Hi everyone! Very basic but I’m a third-year undergraduate student applying to the programme in the first round, and I’m currently working on my motivation letter. I’m following the guidelines, but I’m struggling a bit with figuring out how to structure it specifically and, more importantly, what they actually care about most.
I’ve watched a couple of YouTube videos about writing motivation letters, but I’d really appreciate advice from people who have applied or know the programme well. I don’t want to spend a huge amount of space on things that ultimately don’t make much of a difference to the admissions committee.
For example, I’ve done a lot of work for an important student association at my university and I’m now its president, but obviously it’s still association work. I’ve also mentioned most of this on my CV, so I’m wondering whether I should keep the CV relatively detailed about my experiences and use the motivation letter for a more academic/intellectual discussion of my interests. At the same time, since the programme is quite practical, I’m not sure how academic they expect the letter to be.
I’m also unsure about how specific to get. For example, I’m interested in joining my country’s diplomatic service after graduation. Is that a good thing to say explicitly, or would they have in mind other kinds of career progression? Similarly, when talking about the programme itself, is it better to mention several specific courses, or is it perfectly fine to focus on two or three courses I wanna take that are particularly relevant to my interests?
Another thing I’m slightly worried about is my academic references. I have two professors who taught different modules of the same course, and both are quite central to the academic interests I discuss in my motivation letter so I asked both of them for one. However, I’m wondering whether it would be better to have a reference from a professor in a completely different subject that is not relevant to the program just for the sake of having more variety. The requirement that the referee has supervised written work makes the choice quite limiting for me though so I’m not sure how much this matters.
Finally, I unfortunately haven’t done any internships yet. I haven’t really had the opportunity to, so most of my relevant experience comes from the student association, where I’ve actually had quite a lot of exposure to the field and have been able to meet a number of senior/high-ranking people working in diplomacy and international affairs. I’m wondering how much I should emphasise this, given that it’s not formal professional experience. Also, does it help mentioning that I'm a native French speaker, or to mention my background in general?
Basically, I’d really appreciate any advice on what you think is worth emphasising in the motivation letter, what admissions committees tend to care about, and what is probably not worth spending too much space on.
If anyone who has gotten into the programme would be willing to share some advice, either here or by DM, I’d really appreciate it. It’s a pretty stressful time lol.