Hi, all. I searched around a bit before posting, so apologies if this has already been covered in another thread. I am about to enter my sophomore year as a history major at SF State. Despite reading (somewhat obsessively) a number of articles and Chronicle threads on the hopelessness of the job market for humanities PhDs , I really love my discipline and want advanced training in historical research and pedagogy. The idea of being a high school teacher at the end of it doesn't repulse me at all, but I would still like to be competitive for admission to top programs so I receive enough funding to avoid going into debt and at least have a shot at teaching at the college level after graduation. However, it seems like a lot of these top schools are not very open to students who went to non-elite schools for their undergraduate education. While I've enjoyed the history program here a great deal so far, had I known that going to a csu would limit my options, I probably would've gone to a UC. However, state offered me a scholarship with four years' tuition paid for, and it didn't seem worth going in to debt to attend, say, UC Davis (I didn't make it into Berkeley or LA).
So my question is, what can I do now to make up for going to a state school? My grades were solid my freshman year (3.98 gpa), but good grades are clearly not enough, especially considering state schools' not undeserved reputation for grade inflation. Right now, I'm taking a lot of GE and lower-division survey courses so I won't really have an opportunity to take classes and network with professors with appealing research interests until the spring semester of this coming year. I'm going to start taking Spanish classes this fall (I'm interested in Latin American history) and hope to have made good progress on my language training by the time I graduate. I intend to do an honor thesis senior year and I also think I'll be able to take a class or two at Cal through a cross-registration program. What else should I be doing over the next three years to make my chances better? Do minors look good? I was thinking of doing minors in Latin American Studies and Labor Studies, but recently I've heard that "Studies" disciplines are a bit looked down on. Maybe Sociology or Econ? Or a general interdisciplinary social science minor? Please help me out, fora. Many thanks