Question for Anthropology Grads and Potentional Grads

[DreamingBig]

Hey everyone,

I have a few questions pertaining to Anthropology. I have always wanted to be a professor of the social sciences, and over the past few years I have become extremely interested in the culture and history of early human civilizations. I would love to spend my days researching (and teaching about) early humans, such as Homo Erectus, and also about early civilizations and their cultural ways of life. Would Anthropology be a good route to take? I was considering doing my last two years of undergraduate as an honors degree in Anth so that i would be able to attend graduate school after. I have a few questions about this, however. I live in Canada and I'm wondering if i will NEED to know a second language to become a doctorate student of Anth someday? Likewise, what type of grades should I shoot for if I hope to get into a masters and then PhD in Canada? My grades are always anywhere from 83-93%, so should I just try and maintain this pace?

 

Thanks everyone!

[bioarch_fan]

On 5/12/2017 at 8:13 AM, DreamingBig said:

Hey everyone,

I have a few questions pertaining to Anthropology. I have always wanted to be a professor of the social sciences, and over the past few years I have become extremely interested in the culture and history of early human civilizations. I would love to spend my days researching (and teaching about) early humans, such as Homo Erectus, and also about early civilizations and their cultural ways of life. Would Anthropology be a good route to take? I was considering doing my last two years of undergraduate as an honors degree in Anth so that i would be able to attend graduate school after. I have a few questions about this, however. I live in Canada and I'm wondering if i will NEED to know a second language to become a doctorate student of Anth someday? Likewise, what type of grades should I shoot for if I hope to get into a masters and then PhD in Canada? My grades are always anywhere from 83-93%, so should I just try and maintain this pace?

 

Thanks everyone!

Anthropology is THE field to be in to study the culture and history of early humans. I am a biological anthropology graduate student and I had to teach this topic quite often this past year. Biological anthropology has multiple subfields that you could go into; however, you would want to do the biological anthropology subfield because there's a specialty under that that studies early hominin evolution called paleoanthropology. This is the specialty that you would be interested in.

Learning a second language isn't particularly important for the subfield, but you should be willing to learn the language of the country in which you'd be doing the majority of your field work. For example, if you want to study the Dmanisi branch of Homo erectus, you would want to learn Georgian so you can communicate with the people in that particular country. That's the same for many of the other areas in which early hominins migrated. Furthermore, you would want to potentially learn either German or French because a lot of the early literature would be in one of these two languages. But there's been a lot of literature in the past couple of decades written by English and American scholars, so you'd still be fine with that.

Grades it truly depends on the program in which you'd be applying. If I can make a suggestion, don't look for just Canadian schools because there are A LOT of paleoanthropologists on this side of the border who you would want to work with. So when you start looking at schools I would say talk to those professors whom you would like to work with and see what they say. If you have good grades, what we would consider a 3.4 GPA or higher out of a 4.0 in the States, then you would still be good. I'm not sure about equivalencies in Canada though.

But one thing I would also suggest is mainly apply to master's granting institutions first because most professors from what I have seen prefer to see a master's degree when applying to PhD programs. I was actually told that by a professor up in Canada and one down here in the States.