Career opportunities with a history degree

BornToRun88

History is something I've always had an interest in. I'm thinking of going back to college to do history as a mature student in 2013. UCD Arts is in my mind.

Is there any history graduate who can give me a sample of the kind of jobs you get from a history degree? I hear stuff like teacher(don't want to be a teacher by the way), archivist, researcher, journalist, museum curator and others but I would like to hear from someone with first hand experience.

gutenberg

BornToRun88 wrote: »

History is something I've always had an interest in. I'm thinking of going back to college to do history as a mature student in 2013. UCD Arts is in my mind.

Is there any history graduate who can give me a sample of the kind of jobs you get from a history degree? I hear stuff like teacher(don't want to be a teacher by the way), archivist, researcher, journalist, museum curator and others but I would like to hear from someone with first hand experience.

Hi! I finished my BA, studying history with politics, in 2011 so I thought I'd chip in here.

As I'm sure you know history doesn't really qualify you for anything, but equally you won't be excluded from a lot of career paths except the highly technical & specialist ones. I'll give you an idea of what my colleagues from my course have been getting up to...

One or two have gone down the legal route, with one guy getting a training contract with a Magic Circle firm in London. Another has been working for the Department of Foreign Affairs; a few then have gone into what you might call office/admin/business-y things, including working for Google. Quite a few got TEFL qualifications during their degrees and are doing a bit of travelling, teaching as they go. One girl is getting involved in the foundation of a new education-based charity that she was involved with during her degree, so she's doing a combination of office-type work and advocacy. A few are on graduate schemes, including banking in the UK.

I'd say the majority have gone on to do further study; I think at this stage it's kind of necessary. Of them, there are some real standouts. One has landed a job with a big PR firm in Washington DC after his Masters, another will be working with UNICEF. Because my course had politics as well, a lot of people are interested in working for think tanks, the civil service, and so on, and so are pursuing postgrads at the moment, so at this present time they're not working: it'll be interesting to see where they end up!

Interestingly, only a handful have gone down what you might call the 'traditional' routes for history graduates: I can think of only one who is training to be a teacher, for instance. One guy has got involved with museum and archive work, but at the moment he's on a charity project in Germany so I don't know where it will take him. No one that I know of has become a librarian. Those that have undertaken postgrad study are doing it to get involved with political organisations etc., so I suppose you could call that a 'researcher' role, but only one or two from the class have taken history further with the view to becoming historians, with one girl I can think of off to Cambridge for her PhD.

I hope this helped, if you've any more questions, just ask! And good luck

PS Bear in mind of course that we graduated in the midst of the sh*tstorm that is the Irish economy at the moment, so the jobs listed above are not, in all instances, people's dream careers. But the fact that the vast majority are either working or on some kind of postgrad is probably an achievement in itself, given the state of the job market. A more representative idea might be to ask in 5-10 years what people are doing!

BornToRun88

Thanks for the reply