What Do History Majors do?
The history major has tremendous career flexibility. Graduates often pursue these options:
- College history professor
- By going on to do graduate historical work, you could become a college professor who teaches, writes books, reads papers at professional associations, and spends his or her career contemplating the scenes of historical glory that excite you so much.
- Historical administrator or librarian
- Closely linked to college teaching is historical administration, either as a librarian (an undergraduate history degree plus an MLS in library science will position you for jobs in historical associations and archives) or as an administrator in the numerous historical associations and archival collections across the country. Collections and libraries as diverse as the American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, MA) or the archives department of the American Bible Society (New York City) or the Folger Institute (Washington, DC) all require professional staffs of historians as large as some university history departments. There are over 200 such organizations listed in the American Historical Association's Director of History Departments and Organizations, and all of them need to hire people with history-related training and degrees.
- Elementary or secondary school teacher.
- You may want to add a master's degree to your History/Education undergraduate degree. A history area-of-concentration or history double major will smooth the way to graduate school admission, and a history MA will greatly enhance your career prospects.
- Law School
- You could use your history degree to launch into a number of different career fields which need history as a technical foundation. The most obvious example of this is law: undergraduate history majors generally account for the single largest group of entrants into law schools.
- Career Options for Graduating Students
- State Department-overseas service
- Washington-based institute/“Think Tank”
- Law-related fields
- Park Service-Department of the Interior
- Tourism and travel industry
- Archive work
- Editing-newspaper, magazine, web site
- Foundations, grant-writing
- Museums, archival, preservation, or public relations
- Historical associations (local and national)
- Human Resources-any business, corporation, non-profit organization
- Seminary-clergy
- Law Enforcement: FBI, CIA, Homeland Security
- Researcher-government, corporate, legal
- Secondary Education-high school teacher
- Graduate school-professor-history, English, anthropology, political science, sociology, religion, foreign languages
