Biology or History? Jobs in Academia?

College Majors
1

Hi there,

I’ll be a sophomore this Fall. Currently, I’m a History major with a 4.0 GPA. My goal is to become a researcher, and because History is my favorite subject I thought it’d be great to major and eventually doctorate in this field. But I feel that job opportunities are low and it seems they will be even lower in the future—the main job as history professor is to teach other history majors. Beyond that, the job market is very limited. Research seems to be often ignored. I began to feel that if I major in History, my research will not be seen as practical.

Biology is also one of my favorite subjects, but I don’t know how it is like since I only know the conceptual part of it. But the job market seems less limited. Besides, a bio profesor is always needed because there will always be pre-med students. Research seems more respected. Though I love History, I want to contribute and feel that what I’m doing helps society. Besides, I will be able to receive more funding

Honestly, I don’t know what to do. I’m so confused. Besides, I don’t want to loose my 4.0 GPA. Again, my goal is to learn the foundations and develop skills that will help me get a job as a future researcher in a particular topicnI’m interested—being History number one, Psychology number two, and Biology my thirs option.

Now, Is Biology really that hard? How different is it from History (as a major)? I noticed that most “hard” classes happen to be easier. I already took some History, English, Pols, and Algebra courses, and all of them were fair-game—and mosr people often complain about these courses. So I don’t know if the same applies to Biology.

Note: debt is not a problem. So far, im receiving fa and scholarships.

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Before the rest of my comment, I do want to address this.

History, psychology, and biology are all very different fields. It’s not inconceivable at all that the same person might enjoy the research and approaches from more than one of those fields, but at the graduate level - and as a professional researcher - how you will spend your day and what kinds of skills and tasks you will learn and execute will differ greatly. I mean, at its core research is research - analyzing and writing and lots of thinking - but biologists may spend a lot of time in a wet lab (or not), whereas psychologists may spend their time running experiments or surveys with humans, whereas historians spend a lot of time in archives analyzing primary sources. The reading, the frameworks, the theories, the background - they’re all TOTALLY different.

So if you are thinking about a PhD and a research career (academic or not) in these fields, think not only about what topics are interesting to you but which field’s methods and approaches are appealing to you, and how you envision spending your days. If you haven’t already, I strongly encourage you to get some research experience first. Not only is it basically required to get into a PhD program, it’ll help you more realistically evaluate what the lifestyle of an academic researcher is like. In biology and psychology this usually means assisting a professor and joining their lab. In history, there are many ways, but you can ask your professors how to get research experience that will prepare you for graduate school.

The reality is that the academic job market in both those fields is really limited and competitive, just in different ways. Time to degree for history and biology PhDs is long - while it’s certainly possible to finish in 5-6 years, the median time is actually around 7-8 years. And after that, it’s estimated that only about 10-20% of those folks will find a tenure-track job as a professor. Often, you have to spend several years moving around as a visiting professor (in history) or a postdoc (in biology) before that happens. And you need to be open to moving anywhere in the country, including the small college towns and rural areas that many colleges are located in.

There are a ton of articles across the Internet about the difficulty of embarking upon a career as a history/humanities professor. I encourage you to seek them out. William Pannapacker/Thomas Benton has written several; some are 10+ years old but they are still true/relevant.

The good news, though, is that people with PhDs don’t have a problem finding jobs in general. Although most don’t end up as professors, most of them do end up in fulfilling jobs in which they may use the skills they learned in their PhDs (not historiography or biological research per se, but a lot of the more abstract skills a PhD teaches you). You can probably guess that it’s more likely that a biology PhD will find a non-academic job related to their PhD.

(Lather and repeat for psychology. That’s my field. The landscape may be a little bit better than history and biology, depending on your subfield and research area. But getting a TT job is still challenging.)