Careers for Students of History

I can already hear my mother saying it, “What jobs are there in history?” Sure there are teaching positions, however, unless you have a Ph.D. and are teaching at a school that pays well there isn’t much going there. The problem with historians working in museums is that when the economy is tanking (much like it is now) there is a decrease in the amount of people who attend museums and there are fewer jobs to be had. Other than that there are historians who go into publishing, editing, archival research/maintenance, work in the public sector, or become preservationists. In nearly every single field (except the public sector) the demand for jobs is much higher than the supply of them. In short it is a rough world for history majors and the best way to get a better job is to have dual degrees, higher degrees, or both. I’m not feeling so optimistic about this…

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 6th, 2011 at 4:02 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “Careers for Students of History”

  1. Brooke says:
    April 6, 2011 at 5:44 pm

    I think that with the baby boomers retiring, maybe that will mean more jobs in the sectors that haven’t been really “open” for years, like librarian positions at universities and curator positions and museums. It does seem very unfortunate that our class loves history so much that we majored in it, and now, to do what we love, we’re going to have to work our butts off to be competitive.
    Great post, by the way.