Getting out of Academia

[TheTraditionalProgesterone]

Ever since high school I dreamed of being a history professor, so much so that I never much cared about the bad prospects for employment. I wanted to aim for the top, and if I failed then that was just my fate. I always had a quite specific focus as well: the Ottoman Empire in the 16th and 17th Centuries, particularly with regard to the state and its responses to military, fiscal, and political challenges. Unfortunately I didn't exactly grasp just how steep some of the requirements for History programs were going to be and I don't think I took the necessary steps or made the necessary connections - being a recluse during undergrad didn't help me much. I was reading all the time, but didn't interface with my professors extensively. Enough to get a letter of recommendation and some guidance from our resident Ottoman specialist of course, but I didn't pursue the connections I could have made nearly well enough, though academically I did fine graduating in 3.5 years with a 3.8 GPA. My last year I did a bit more to build up my credentials, going to a summer Turkish-language program and studying abroad in Istanbul. Now I'm functionally fluent in Turkish, and what deficiencies I have will probably be gone before Fall 2016. That being said, primary sources are a wholly different problem as my Ottoman is barely good enough to squeeze out the most basic meaning from contemporary texts, and the professors who I'd have hoped would help me have been unforthcoming in this regard. This leaves me pretty limited when it comes to the quality of research I can engage in, but I've been doing my best to whip together a solid essay with at least the bare minimum of primary source references needed to be taken seriously. The crux of the matter is that I don't feel particularly competitive, and I'm not sure what I could do within a reasonable timeframe to correct this. In order to write academic papers on the Ottomans I need to be able to read the language, and I can't learn to read the language through any means other than brute-forcing it because I have so few resources to work with.

 

Leaving that aside, lately I've started to take my head out of the cloud it's been in ever since high school and realize that having a secure career is more important to me than I'd thought it was. There's nothing I'd love more than to come away with a tenure-track position at a university or any other kind of secure reasonably-paying academic job that lets me raise a family, but I no longer feel like committing five years or more to university is worth it if I'm going to come out with barely a shot at a good job anyway. My youth is literally ticking away, something a lot of people here can probably relate to. Plus I met a nice girl in Turkey and I'm starting to realize that there's more to life than the mountains of books I've been surrounding myself with for all these years (even though I do still love them oh so much!)

 

Yet... I just graduated with a BA in History. It's too late to do what so many people told me to do in high school and "study something useful". If I could go back in time to my high school self I know I'd tell him to either start learning Turkish immediately instead of waiting until junior year of university or to get out of history entirely and do more of that math he hated so much, but that's not happening now. I could go back to school and get a different BA, but that just takes me back to the original problem of being stuck in university for an ungodly amount of time, this time around not while doing what I love. I could go for an MA in history, use the opportunity to build up my skills until I am ready for the PhD, but that only maybe solves the problems I listed in the first paragraph, not the ones in the second.

 

I've looked at plenty of internet pages with "alternative careers for history majors" and nothing seems terribly worthwhile or appealing, but surely there's some sort of obvious answer here that I'm just not seeing. How do I get out of academia and build a respectable career? Do I even need to get out? Maybe I'm just being overly anxious when I think I'm not competitive, I've simply never met anyone else in my field who I could compare myself to. Anyway, I'm not looking for a miracle solution, just your thoughts. This is an issue that's been pressing down on me for far, far too long.

Edited June 18, 2015 by TheTraditionalProgesterone

[mvlchicago]

"Plus I met a nice girl in Turkey and I'm starting to realize that there's more to life than the mountains of books I've been surrounding myself with for all these years (even though I do still love them oh so much!)"

DAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW.

Sorry. Now that that's out of my system...

 

First off, breathe. It seems like you've been going full steam for awhile, which is good, but also means that most of your energy has been dedicated to something that you're seriously questioning. And that's okay! The transition between academia and "the real world" takes time and effort. I think this is the #1 thing I wish I'd had realized while prepping for PhD programs: turns out most people don't actually care how much Latin you can parse.

 

I would suggest continuing with your applications, at least. This is because you've been doing so much to try and set yourself up for a history project that maybe you should at least try to get into a program and see what happens. It's also because I think no matter what field you're in (ranging from Comp Sci to Philosophy) it's increasingly becoming the case that you need a masters degree to start most careers. If you're admitted to a PhD program, you won't have to pay for the masters while getting a real chance to make sure you want to leave academia. This will also give you time (a couple of years) to really explore the full set of fields you could possibly enter and spend a couple summers doing the internships necessary to make connections in them: journalism, media, museums, social science research in tech industries, programming, thinktanks, there's a lot of stuff you can do with history.

The biggest thing it's going to take is time; so I wouldn't stress the fact that it's taking you some to figure things out! I know that "youth ticking away" is something with which we're all concerned, but no matter what field you go into, it's going to take time to build the sort of stuff you need for a successful career. So don't put to much pressure on yourself! Enjoy the time you've got now while prepping to make your next moves .

Edited June 18, 2015 by mvlchicago

[random_grad]

I had the same doubts and ended up taking a year to think about it. The following helped me decide:

I wrote on a white board :

- the different things that mattered to me in this life. To get the ball rolling, consider doing this exercise: what would you do if you had 10y to live? What would you do if you had 3y to live? What would you do ifnyou had 6 months to live? And write all that comes to mind for 2 min each. Some crazy stuff might come up and some patterns too.

- what are you good at and what you don t enjoy doing. What are the alternatives to academia you d enjoy?

- where does this all overlap, how does it interact

Doing a master s helped too, but it was really the self analyzis that gave me the answer. Took me 4 months to complete my white board brainstorm fully and of course much longer overall.

As for the feeling of youth going away - as you get older imo a realization comes that it s entirely up to you how you treat your youth. You can still party aĺl you want at age 50 or you can choose to settle down at age 22. It s all individual. For a while I felt like I was 16 and then my age caught up with me but I like my age now. It s nice to feel mature.

For 2nd career, great advice above that it will take time to become good at whatever else you do. History majors can do many things , from the more obvious like journalism or maketing to embassy work to any type of office work to starting your own business. Consider doing information interviews with professionals in fields of interest. Take a job or two see if you like doing that. Grad school will still be here for you.

Edited June 18, 2015 by random_grad

[TMP]

if you're interested in policy and/research, have you tried looking into think-tanks?  

 

It's always good to head into a program (whether MA or PhD) with an open-mind for what you'd like to do after.   Whether you do MA first (separately) or get into a PhD program, you can reasonably expect to be taking language classes in your first few years in addition to your regular history coursework.  Pretty intense but it's only if you want a PhD in Ottoman history and it's not unusual for these PhD students to spend their first summer or two abroad studying Turkish with governmental grants.

 

You're not the only one who went through "omg I should have done all this sooner."  There is nothing you can do, except make the most of what you DO have and get yourself on course toward your goal--whatever it is.

[Gambaosaka1]

if you're interested in policy and/research, have you tried looking into think-tanks?  

 

It's always good to head into a program (whether MA or PhD) with an open-mind for what you'd like to do after.   Whether you do MA first (separately) or get into a PhD program, you can reasonably expect to be taking language classes in your first few years in addition to your regular history coursework.  Pretty intense but it's only if you want a PhD in Ottoman history and it's not unusual for these PhD students to spend their first summer or two abroad studying Turkish with governmental grants.

 

You're not the only one who went through "omg I should have done all this sooner."  There is nothing you can do, except make the most of what you DO have and get yourself on course toward your goal--whatever it is.

 

I think you mean "think-wanks" 

 

My job over the past 5 years has been producing interviews. Would be wary of working for think-tanks or assuming you will be doing anything interesting or fulfilling. There are exceptions but most of them tend be quite shit in my view.

 

Academics who are affiliated with these institutions are a different story. Mostly these are highly political institutions with agenda-driven research and many of them don't have people with real area-expertise on their staff.

 

One "highly-respected" one has people right now as "Syria experts" who used to be "Bosnia experts" and "Russian politics experts" before that. I think you get the picture. I'm at work right now so can't be really coherent on this but these organizations really make my skin crawl.