Going to from one field of study to another (Undergrad to Grad)

[RDG1836]

Hey all!

This is my first post on here and I'm terrified really excited. So here's my dilemma: I've completed my undergrad and have always known that I've wanted to go to Graduate School and - oddly enough - I knew it would either be in screenwriting (my undergrad) or I'd go off paths completely and pursue my other passion, which is the study of history. I've had my fill of the film industry after working on a feature film, some commercials, doing the LA thing for a while and whatnot. I'm just not looking for that kind of life any longer. Academia is a place I've always wanted to be and so I'm strongly considering - if not fully decided already - to finally pursue my love of history and get my masters and possibly my PhD as well.

Frankly, most of this is coming from my imagination. It's something I want to do and I've been doing research on the schools I want, but a few things are frightening me. The biggest hurdle for me right now is the obvious one - is changing your academic path something schools will consider in a negative way? "Oh, he did film as his undergrad and now he wants to do history? We might as well choose someone who did their undergrad in history!"

This thought it beginning to worry me. I've got a 3.89 GPA from undergrad and I'm prepping like mad for my GRE. All of this is possible, right? Or is it just a pipe dream and I should stick to my current path in life? Or should I do another undergrad altogether? Oh gosh, the possibilities.

As you can tell, I'm really nervous and confused about the whole thing. Any advice would be really appreciated. Thanks guys!

[rising_star]

First, the good news. YES, you can change your academic path. I did it and so have many others on here. The key is being able to convincingly articulate your interests in your SOP and having good recommendation letters. It also helps if you can convince a faculty member they want to work with you. 

Have you taken any undergraduate history courses? Are you able to articulate a time period and/or region/theme of interest for you in history? If the answers to both those questions is no, then it's going to be difficult for you to get into a good master's program. If that's the case, you may want to try taking a few history courses at a local institution to help you refine your interests and get good letters of rec in history.

That aside, make sure that academia is for you. Check out the forums on the Chronicle of Higher Ed's site to get a sense of what academia is like. Then, go check out VersatilePhD to see why people are leaving academia even after getting an advanced degree. It's difficult to know if you'll like academia until you're in it because, quite frankly, it is basically nothing like your undergraduate experience. I'm not sure what you dislike about the film industry but it has more in common with academia than you might be interested in.

Good luck!

[ExponentialDecay]

if you've been researching schools, you will have come across them addressing your question in their application materials. usually they will say something like "to apply, you need x credits in [subject]"

[knp]

@ExponentialDecay I think that's common in most fields, but I haven't seen it much in history: it and anthropology seem to be the two most lackadaisical about actual credits-in-discipline. I might have seen that requirement in one department, but most of the programs to which I applied did not have a credits-in requirement at all. I still marvel that they let me into my program when I had, depending on how you stretch the definition, either three or six credits in this discipline before I started this PhD.

That doesn't mean that you don't have to have a lot of relevant knowledge or work, but that the definition of 'relevant' is a lot broader. For the applicant, this simultaneously provides flexibility and the potential for headaches acquired trying to understand what counts as 'relevant.' The most common move into history I'm aware of, for example, is for people to go from regional (or theme)/literature studies departments: from classics, from American studies, from Chinese language and literature, etc. 

@RDG1836 The three broad areas in which you'll want to evaluate your preparation, I think, are 1) region/period familiarity, 2) language skills, and 3) background in the discipline.

First a bit of background on divisions of study, because I can't tell how familiar with the discipline you are. As far as I understand, history is divided up in professional chunks by region and period. 'Region' may be country or world region; you could say 'Russia' or 'central Asia' depending on the venue and focus, e.g.. I believe that the three divisions of period people talk about most are modern, early modern, and pre-modern (which might be subdivided into 'medieval' and 'ancient' but I may be out of date on that latter one especially). So basically all historians—although history of science jumps to mind as a possible exception—will identify in groups based on those two factors. Over at that table in the cafeteria are the historians of modern Latin America, and over there are modern Europe, and over there are early modern Europe. Of course we are all interdisciplinary and love global perspectives nowadays, but as an applicant you want to describe yourself as somebody who either fits into one of those identities—I study modern central America—or draws connections on one main dimension. (E.g., "I study the early modern Mediterranean and connections between Europe and north Africa" is very cohesive and no problem.) I worry I am over-specifying, but I mostly want to warn you away from "I study all of Asia over five hundred years." So when I talk about the region/period you want to study, this is the scale I'm talking about.

1) So, how can you get adequate familiarity with the region/period combination with which you will initially identify yourself (and probably be encouraged to break out of later)?

Lots and lots of ways! Do you have any coursework on that region/period, especially coursework that involved research papers of 5+ and ideally 15+ page papers? If yes, that's great! That's why lots of people come into history from film studies or political science, etc.: if you want to study, say, post-war Europe, a background in studying either Czech resistance cinema or the economic origins of NATO could help you out! Have you gone to any libraries and read books? That's a start! More on that later. How did you decide this interested you?

A side note: I don't suppose you've worked on any film or anything with a historical component, and gained some interest that way? I can pretty much guarantee you an acceptance to one or several master's programs if part of your story is, "my interest in the history of the incorporation of immigrant communities in the United States was piqued by having to do some research on 1960s Chinatown for that Bruce Lee movie last year, and I'm looking to come to your master's program to learn more about it professionally." Most accepted students obviously don't have this, but with all the tremendous historical work on mid-century America going on on TV this decade, I thought it was worth a mention on the off-chance.

2) Do you know the languages of the region/period you want to study? If you want to study primarily Anglophone parts of US history, you might want to lazily start doing Duolingo French or something, or brushing up on whatever high school language you had, but you don't really have to worry about it. If you study a region with a higher language barrier from English, but you know many or all of the relevant languages pretty well—whether that background is heritage, academic, or other—you might look up whether there are any other languages all the other scholars in your region/period seem to use, but otherwise don't worry about it. If you want to study China or classical Greece or something else where there are several languages and/or the language(s) are really hard, and you know them poorly or not at all, it's time to hold your own feet to the fire and start learning the relevant languages as intensely as possible.

3) You do need to become familiar with some of the academic conversations to which you'd like to contribute in history. Are you? You'll basically only be already if you have more courses in the discipline or have spent more time in the library reading academic monographs than you seem from your first post. You don't need to be a master of all your questions, but only by reading real history from the last 10, maybe 10-15, years are you going to find out what kind of questions we are all occupied with now. Luckily, this really doesn't need an academic background in it! The library and academia.edu, as well as any alumni online access you may have from college or JSTOR's three free articles are all valuable ways to get started. I am tired and have written a lot tonight, so I will not give any more advice on this, but I just wanted to say that in history's case, familiarity with the relevant history is perhaps most productively conceptualized as a question that follows familiarity with period/region.

[ExponentialDecay]

dude @knp all this time I was convinced that you're in literature. So that's one thing I learned from your comment, aside from a lot of things about how academic history works!

[Neist]

17 hours ago, knp said:

First a bit of background on divisions of study, because I can't tell how familiar with the discipline you are. As far as I understand, history is divided up in professional chunks by region and period. 'Region' may be country or world region; you could say 'Russia' or 'central Asia' depending on the venue and focus, e.g.. I believe that the three divisions of period people talk about most are modern, early modern, and pre-modern (which might be subdivided into 'medieval' and 'ancient' but I may be out of date on that latter one especially). So basically all historians—although history of science jumps to mind as a possible exception—will identify in groups based on those two factors.

 

2

I don't have anything meaningful to add other than you are generally correct on the history of science front. Historians of science typically identify, or at least more primarily identify, by discipline, and dedicated history of science programs usually identify their strengths by discipline. So, for example, I study the history of evolutionary biology. 

Edited January 2, 2017 by Neist
Clarification.

[Quickmick]

As another who is 'switching fields' from MS to PhD I would contribute something to the 'credits in' discussion. With a minor in history I had 20ish cr from UG and the one program I applied to that had a stated cr requirement showed me something about this. First of all, when I spoke with the graduate coordinator, they said to speak with my poi (who is head of the program) and see what they want. So I initiated that conversation, and the person said, "wait, we have a cr requirement?" I did take one more class, but was told that I have plenty so not to worry about the stated number.

My point is that even in cases where there is a stated requirement--at least in one case--it may not be a hard and fast rule, so if there is a program that interests you and you are short of a stated requirement you might want to ask how strict they are in that regard.

Edited January 2, 2017 by Quickmick

[Sigaba]

On 12/30/2016 at 10:01 AM, RDG1836 said:

Hey all!

This is my first post on here and I'm terrified really excited. So here's my dilemma: I've completed my undergrad and have always known that I've wanted to go to Graduate School and - oddly enough - I knew it would either be in screenwriting (my undergrad) or I'd go off paths completely and pursue my other passion, which is the study of history. I've had my fill of the film industry after working on a feature film, some commercials, doing the LA thing for a while and whatnot. I'm just not looking for that kind of life any longer. Academia is a place I've always wanted to be and so I'm strongly considering - if not fully decided already - to finally pursue my love of history and get my masters and possibly my PhD as well.

Frankly, most of this is coming from my imagination. It's something I want to do and I've been doing research on the schools I want, but a few things are frightening me. The biggest hurdle for me right now is the obvious one - is changing your academic path something schools will consider in a negative way? "Oh, he did film as his undergrad and now he wants to do history? We might as well choose someone who did their undergrad in history!"

This thought it beginning to worry me. I've got a 3.89 GPA from undergrad and I'm prepping like mad for my GRE. All of this is possible, right? Or is it just a pipe dream and I should stick to my current path in life? Or should I do another undergrad altogether? Oh gosh, the possibilities.

As you can tell, I'm really nervous and confused about the whole thing. Any advice would be really appreciated. Thanks guys!

@RDG1836 I recommend that you assess what don't you like about the Industry and what leads you to believe that things are better in the Ivory Tower. IME, the sound a know it all undergraduate makes when he's rolling his eyes is a lot like the sound an A list director makes on a conference call when you tell him that's not the way it happened. (But I'm not bitter.)

IRT @knp's guidance, I would counter that a historian is a historian is a historian. No matter how focused one may be on a leaf upon a tree's most remote branch, you will also need to talk intelligently about the forest.

I would also add that there's at least one more vector that historians use to define themselves in addition to region and area--that is historians also (and in many cases, primarily) define themselves as social, cultural, political, military, economic, and so forth historians of [period] and [place]. Consequently, you will need to be able to figure out very quickly the differences among a military historian who studies the American Civil War, an Americanist who studies the Civil War, and a historian of the American Civil War.

(Why walk away from the Industry at this point in time? I strongly suspect that there's going to be an incredible explosion of creativity in defiance of the hammer the federal government is going to attempt to drop on the TMZ. Which is more fulfilling for you? Writing the first draft of the history of that contest, or being in that fight and writing about it later?)