If you are a first or second-year student majoring in Political Science or a related field, you may be able to graduate with both a bachelor's degree and a master's degree from IU in just five years through our Political Analysis and Survey Science (PASS) Accelerated Master's Program (AMP).
At this time, eligibility for the PASS AMP is limited to students who are considering a major or minor in Political Science or who are enrolled in Y205.
The new Political Science program in Political Analytics and Survey Science is an Accelerated Master's Program that builds directly on courses you are already taking. The program gives you marketable skills in survey research and data analysis: the same skills used by political campaigns, polling firms, market research companies, government agencies, and academic researchers.
The demand for people who can design surveys, analyze data, and communicate findings clearly has never been higher. A master's degree in Political Analytics and Survey Science signals to employers and Ph.D. programs alike that you have not just read about quantitative methods, but that you have used them to investigate real-world problems, using real-world data.
Graduates of this program will be prepared for careers in:
The PASS AMP curriculum is built around seven core competencies:
You will leave the program proficient in Qualtrics, R, and Markdown; tools that are commonly used by research scientists across academia, industry, and government.
The best time to position yourself for our PASS AMP is right now, in your first or second year. There are four undergraduate courses that serve as the on-ramp to the program. Students who complete these courses will have satisfied a significant portion of the prerequisite requirements and will be well-prepared for graduate-level work.
The gateway to empirical political science. Analyzing Politics introduces you to how political scientists ask and answer questions using data. Required for all Political Science majors, this course is the logical starting point for any student interested in the PASS AMP.
The program's core quantitative foundation, designed for students who believe they don’t like math. Introductory Statistics builds the statistical reasoning skills you will need for graduate methods courses: everything from basic data structures, probability distributions, and hypothesis testing through the analysis of variance (ANOVA) and linear regression.
A substantive course on how public opinion is measured, shaped, and interpreted. Public Opinion connects the theoretical and normative questions political scientists care about (theories of survey response, attitudes, and polling methodology) with the tools used to study them.
This course is the programming companion to Introductory Statistics. Statistics II teaches you to conduct, visualize, and report statistical analyses in R, the primary statistical software used across the social sciences. Completing both Y395 and Y401 will prepare you to take similar classes at the graduate level, giving you the training necessary to begin a career in data analytics. The concepts are the same as those covered in Introductory Statistics, but we will be using free statistical software in every single class.
Students who begin the gateway courses in their first or second year can follow this trajectory:
Nine credit hours of graduate coursework can be applied toward both your B.A. and your master’s degree. This means that your fifth year requires only the work needed to finish the M.A., not to repeat what you have already done.
The earlier you connect with the program, the more flexibility you will have in planning your course sequence. If you are a first- or second-year student curious about whether this program is right for you, reach out to set up an introductory meeting with Professor DeSante.
Christopher D. DeSante, Ph.D.
Program Director, PASS-AMP
Associate Professor
Department of Political Science
Email: cdesante@iu.edu
There is no obligation and no application required to have an initial conversation. If you have taken Y205 or Y395 and found yourself having fun, this program was designed for you.
Top left: Regression line predicting affect towards Donald Trump as a function of attitudes related towards race and policing from the American National Election Studies
Bottom left: Jittered plot of feeling thermometer ratings of President Trump by partisan identification; data from the American National Election Studies
Right: Climate change at the Congressional District Level; data from Congressional Climate Change Data (Levy and DeSante 2026)
The College of Arts