QueDoisJeFaire

In terms of what I'm interested in, the two professors who most closely match are at Notre Dame and Cardiff, neither of which would be a good idea for a PhD. Notre Dame doesn't offer funding for MAs and funding would be impossible as a foreign student in the UK. Additionally, I believe there were only six (6) TT jobs for Modern Europeanists in 2019, but one of those was at Harvard so let's call it five. I can't imagine entering the job market to these numbers, but I also can't resign myself to not doing this.

So, I'm now a History and French double major, and should be spending two months in France next summer followed by my fall semester in Angers focusing on French coursework. I'm virtually certain I'm going to be doing a two year MA following my undergrad. The advice here played a big role in making those choices, so thank you everybody. I've also realized after finally taking some real courses that I'm far more interested in modern Europe than anything else, especially the French right, political Catholicism, and mass politics during the Third Republic through the Vichy period. So, that kind of negates the original question. Still eager to hear if anybody has any specific suggestions for programs I should be keeping in mind!

Oh right, I meant to mention that I’m working on a French minor. I only have a year of French so far, but I’m doing pretty well and I anticipate being fairly proficient by next fall. I’m currently trying to decide if I can afford to pay to travel for an intensive course over the summer in order to really advance. I was wondering about Minnesota. The German history professor at my school got his PhD from there, and he’s somebody who I would love to be one of my letter writers.

Hey, I'm putting together a list of professors whose work I find particularly interesting, but I wanted to check here to see what people might suggest in terms of programs to look at. I'm hoping to study Early Modern France, and will almost certainly be looking to complete an MA program before applying to PhD programs. Honestly I'd love to study France and the Mediterranean. I'm getting kind of a late start on all this so I'm honestly not positive about anything more specific than that right now, but I'm trying to read as much as possible to become more familiar with the current scholarship before the summer. Dr. Junko Takeda at Syracuse seems like the best fit for my interests right now, but none of the grad students on their website have her as an advisor so I'm not sure that's a possibility. I'm also concerned a bit. My school, a small public liberal arts college, only has two European historians, one for Revolutionary/Imperial era France and one for 20th century Germany. There are literally no courses taught for European history before the French Revolution. I'm on path to have no more than three European history courses under my belt by the time I graduate, and nothing related to the Early Modern world in any context. Is this going to be a major problem for me?

I don’t, and the language options at my school aren’t very broad. There also aren’t any faculty with a closely related focus, so I’m not sure that would be the best idea. After a lengthy talk with the professor who would be my advisor should I choose history, I’m leaning towards French history. I’ve definitely had a lot of casual interests. Given my school and my circumstances, I’m really excited about this. I’ve learned a small amount of French in the past on my own but don’t know a ton. I’ve registered for French for the fall and ideally would like to put a lot of work into it over this next year/next summer to try to test into more advanced courses for fall 2019. Everybody’s advice here has been incredible and I really appreciate everyone who took the time to give their input. I’m not 100% sure which way to go yet, but I have a much better grasp on what I need to be thinking about.

It does, though I really have to stress the most I've done so far is introductory algebra, where it doesn't feel like I've been doing a lot of abstract thinking. What I've done so far I enjoy, however. I find it very satisfying working through equations. I really want to thank everybody for all the info. It's very helpful, though learning I have even a small shot depending on how well I handle things from here on out is really making me consider something that feels riskier than some other options! If I had to make up my mind today, I'm most interested in the early modern Mediterranean, and will need to give a lot of thought to a more specific focus. I've started poking around and checking out different history departments, however, both in terms of placement and what they seem to be most oriented towards. I still have so much to learn. I've spent quite some time only reading history for pleasure, and am not super familiar with the specific, modern scholarship of most of my interests. (Braudel is who first sparked my interest in the early modern Mediterranean a few years back, for instance.)

I apologize, I wasn’t trying to trivialize or be flippant about Reconstruction. I also apologize if I have misunderstood in the past, but I was under the impression that the career prospects for those who specialize in American History were especially poor, even compared to many others. Regarding that list, I also didn’t mean to imply I wanted to pursue research about all of those subjects collectively. Just that I would be pretty happy having the opportunity to research any one of them individually. I am aware I would need to choose a narrow focus. As I said, I’ve spent the last year assuming I wouldn’t be going to grad school for history, and the decade preceding that assuming I wouldn’t even be able to. It’s only since the end of spring semester, and learning of my acceptance to a full university, that I’ve begun to look into the subject further. Regarding preparation for languages, that’s one reason I posted this. If I wait to make my decision about graduate school in history or math any longer, I’d be even more concerned about learning a language. I need to make a decision before I register for fall classes specifically so I can figure out which language to begin work on.

So, if I do get a math degree, I have 3 years left in school as opposed to 2, and I almost certainly would get a second undergrad degree because of that. I've considered doing both math/stats and history. I feel like it'd be hard or impossible to prepare for applying to graduate school in EITHER math or history, however, since I feel like I'd certainly need to focus on one or the other to get the kind of recommendations I would need.

This is true! It's the main reason I'm reconsidering. I will say looking into statistics isn't only about job prospects, it was just the first thing I'd looked into that had both good job prospects and didn't sound absolutely awful to me. My big concern is not being able to hack the kind of advanced math that I won't even be exposed to for another 2 or 3 years, at which point I'd feel so deep in the hole I wouldn't know what to do if I realized it wasn't for me. I spent a period of months focusing on what I'd need to do for law school last fall/winter, but I kept coming back to fantasizing about going to school for history. Same thing the last few months regarding statistics. That article about adjuncts was good to read, I may just need to be scared away from this every so often. But then I wonder, if I don't try for this, will I just spend the rest of my life wishing I had? EDIT: Sorry for the multiple posts. I couldn't figure out how to split up quotes from a single post.

So it's not, in and of itself, disqualifying from the top 10-15 schools? I'd be very interested in doing that, actually.

I'm definitely interested, in theory, in the kinds of jobs I'd be able to get with a humanities degree. I'll need to look into that more, particularly what kinds of skills I would need at graduation to enter the job market. Yeah, from what I understand, I have a shot at attending a decent law school with reduced tuition. Not sure I'd enjoy law any more than, say, biostatistics. I spent some time in the fall trying to find a part time job in a law office, which I feel like would provide some good perspective. I spent a ton of time on TLS over winter break, which convinced me I'd have a shot. Not at big law, but definitely at something like a public defender. I will say I've been spooked, however, at the news that applications to law school are on the rise again after declining for a good many years. I don't want to end up in a situation like law school graduates in 08/09. In rough order of interest: 1) Medieval/Early Modern Mediterranean, 2) Late Antiquity, esp. eastern Mediterranean, 3) Eastern Europe in the 19th century, 4) Early history of the USSR, 5) Very late history/dissolution of the USSR, 6) The Cold War in South America/Indonesia. Most especially the Dirty War in Argentina and the crackdowns in Indonesia in 65/66, 7) Caribbean/Atlantic in the 17th and 18th centuries. I also am deeply in love with learning about Reconstruction, but I have also heard that American history is kind of a dead end at the moment.

So, I'm in undergrad. Long story short, I didn't know what I wanted to do out of high school, went to community college in 2005 and fucked up my GPA for a few years, and then kind of gave up. Around age 20 I realized I wanted to be in history academia, but figured I'd ruined things for myself already. Fast forward to last summer. I'm in my early 30s, am tired of working retail, and go back to school. I've actually realized how to be a real student this time, got a 4.0 for my last two semesters and have been accepted to a decent state school for the Fall to finish my undergrad degree. My overall GPA is not good, but I've been doing very well since returning to school. However, I've spent most of the last year hearing horror stories about people who have actually graduated with history PhDs. One of my professors, when I expressed concerns about the time and effort it would take compared to job prospects, told me that a couple years back, UNCG had a single, open history associate professorship that received nearly 1,000 applications. So I started to look at law school. I'd be very interested in public service law, but the prospect of making the kind of money public service lawyers make while taking on as much as $150,000 in debt feels unwise. This last semester, after very much enjoying a statistics course, I began looking into switching to a math major. With just a masters, with the right supplementary skills, the career prospects for statistics graduates are very good. I've never taken any high level math, but I'm taking precalculus over the summer and will make my decision in the Fall. The problem is, for nearly 13 years the ONLY thing I have been able to imagine myself doing and loving is history. I'm really worried about A) Burning out before I finish my math degree, or b) Burning out after a few years working professionally in a quantitative career. I've never done any real history research (Just papers for my courses.), but my school has a supervised undergraduate research program that would let me get genuine experience if I wanted to. Looking into it, a real career with a statistics degree would still require graduate school. If that's my goal anyway, I'm starting to reconsider ruling out history. So here's my question(s). 1) Would I have ANY shot at a full time academic career with a history degree if I went anywhere but one of the best schools? 2) Assuming my GPA ends up around 3.2 (Entirely because of courses taken a decade ago. My goal is to get stellar grades for the remainder of my undergrad degree. My grades in my history courses are very good, as well, if that matters at all.), does that lock me out entirely from the kind of schools I would need to get accepted to in order to have reasonable career prospects? My school is a public liberal arts college, with very small class sizes. I have high hopes of being able to get excellent letters of recommendation, and at least a full year of supervised undergrad research. Will my applications be tossed because of my overall GPA, however? 3) Is working as an adjunct as soul-crushing as everybody says, assuming TT positions are forever out of my reach? 4) I'm intrigued by public history. Are the career prospects in non-academic related public history at all decent? 5) If I do end up majoring in math/stats, does anybody know of any way I could transform that into an at least history-adjacent career?