“No internships (I would despise working in a corporate setting sitting behind a desk and fetching coffee) and no job.”
Well, those aren’t the only kinds of internships Different businesses/organizations do internships differently. I’m an intern at a local nonprofit this summer and it’s nothing like that; it’s not for an organization I plan on staying with and it doesn’t really match any of my future plans, but I’m getting the work experience and learning about what it takes to run an nonprofit. Who knows, maybe that experience will help me somehow in the future, even if not directly.
Since your mom uses the car right now while you’re home for the summer, (I’m assuming), can you get some kind of employment during the school year? Maybe on campus? And even if you think you’d despise working in an office you might want to give it a try anyway. Maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as you think, and even if for some reason it WAS awful it would only be temporary.
I mean you can’t be too picky dude at some point if you get an opportunity to be employed, even if it’s not the most ideal one out there, go for it! Getting an internship in an office doesn’t mean that’s what you’ll spend the rest of your life doing and any work experience you can get now will help you secure a job that you can use to support yourself while you figure out your next steps.
(also – I’m just an undergrad too so please take anything I say with a grain of salt. The more experienced adults here might have different stuff to say)
@radmadeline I’m 85% sure I have a job on campus lined up for the next year. Also, I was more opposed to the idea of following a career path I would hate like getting an MBA or going to law school, not opposed to taking temp job. Also, I take it you don’t go to Penn, because practically everybody that fishes for interns there are big corporations looking for Whartonites and maybe a few straggling College students to do what I said earlier: sit behind a desk, do mindless endless busy work, and fetch coffee.
It’s awesome that you’re at least pretty sure you have a job lined up for next semester! I totally get you, I’m struggling to pick my own major rn (trying to balance something ‘practical’ vs my interests) and that’s one of my fears too. You’re right, I don’t go to Penn, but I do go to Harvard so I do know what you’re talking about to an extent because we have a bunch if Econ majors But I was just saying that any kind of employment, including that sitting behind the desk and getting coffee, will probably be helpful right now and I don’t think it’ll set you on a path you don’t want unless you choose to do so, so I was just saying not to rule it out necessarily, at least not right now o: That’s just some of the advice I got when I was seeking jobs this year.
“But that said, why have so many people bought into the idea that the point of a degree named X is intended to result in placement into a job named X? Yes, this is the case in many of the applied fields (engineering, speech pathology, finance,…), but it certainly isn’t the case for most degree fields.”
College isn’t supposed to be trade school.
I was a political science major at a very selective school and ended up in marketing for Nike and Levis. Certainly had nothing to do with political science. I’ve continued to be very interested in politics in my personal life. My husband also did not directly use his Economics degree in his career path and has been very successful as well. We have a friend who was a Classics major and started his own tech company and is one of the most successful (and interesting) people we know!
Go to the career center to see what type of job is ‘you’. Go to the library and borrow /to the bookstore and buy, ‘Do what you are’.
At some point you’ll have to be employed; if you want to be self sufficient you have to figure it out, now, while at Penn. And if you don’t want to earn 25k a year cobbling together a few hours here and there as an adjunct teaching composition or whatever they ask you to, then you need to start thinking now. As for feeling sad about classmates graduatung, well, how do you think you’ll feel if you’re not employed and stick at home? Your classmates are the ones who pushed you to consider your career, they’ll understand it if you need one more year to get skills alongside your knowledge. Think about classes you could add to your resume, or fields you could be interested in (I listed a bunch) and what you need to do to get there.
Since you’re not doing anything this summer, make an appointment and schedule time at the career center - if it’s a car ride or train ride I don’t see how you can NOT do that actually.
I can assure you that MANY interns’ job is not to sit around and fetch coffee.
Are you not interested in museums, art, auction houses, forensic science?
Even if your goal was to go straight to a PhD, your summers would have been a problem. Each summer after sophomore year on is supposed to be dedicated to something - if not an internship or a project, work. It has to be something productive you can put on your resume. So, start with the career center
BTW you’re not serious about mcDonald’s. If you were, you’d know about wage increases at Walmart. However, yes, if there’s a job opening at McDonald’s in your village, go and ask for 10hours, or Walmart or whatever there is. Use that as a starting point of what you don’t want to do and why but also as a way to see what you’re good at, to find at least one aspect of the job you appreciate.
Can you contact the Museum since you helped plan an exhibition and they would know you - wouldn’t they have some sort of semi-internship for you? Or ANY museum? Even small towns have small museums.
What about TFA?
As others have said, your degree isn’t useless, and you certainly don’t have zero job prospects. People with Egyptology degrees are employed in many different fields, some of them in academia and others far afield.
People can have a career in academia, even in today’s market. Last year there were 3 (!) tenure-track job openings in Egyptology in the US, two of them brand new positions. This year there were two more Egyptology openings in the US and several post-doc positions that were filled by recently graduated Egyptology PhDs. Once you factor in positions in other countries, particularly Egyptology-heavy countries in Europe like Germany, prospects for a newly minted PhD are not entirely terrible. Of course, there are also teaching/research positions in the US in art history, history, linguistics, religious studies, anthropology, etc. (depending on one’s particular area of specialization). Due to extreme budget slashes in the humanities, humanities PhD programs have cut back considerably on the number of students they admit, so those who make it into graduate school have pretty decent odds of landing a job somewhere.
That said, job security is not nearly as secure as, say, in engineering or business. In fact, even getting into graduate school can be nightmarishly difficult due to the financial situation I mentioned above. As you probably know, there are currently only a few strong Egyptology programs in the US (Chicago, Penn, Johns Hopkins, UCLA, and Brown) and a handful of weaker programs (Berkeley, Michigan, NYU, and perhaps Emory for art history). The University of Memphis is unique in offering a funded master’s program. Yale’s program has imploded due to the scandal in NELC, although new hires may change that. One could also add Toronto, although its funding for American students is abysmal. When you consider that many departments accept only one or two Egyptology students per year, PhD admissions is extremely competitive.
Spring of senior year is definitely a bad time to “figure something out” if graduate school doesn’t work out or if you decide you don’t want to attend. It’s good that you’re considering other career options. Too many get so focused on academia that they’re at a loss when they don’t get into any of the graduate programs to which they applied. (This is an all too common occurrence in the humanities for even the most qualified applicants, unlike other fields like engineering or the biological sciences.)
It’s difficult to participate in excavations as a hobbyist, certainly, but there are many people who take up Egyptology as a hobby. Some of them are dilettantes who mostly read popular news articles and watch the latest flashy documentaries, but many are remarkably well-informed and even present their research at professional conferences such as ARCE and ASOR. Often people with expertise in other areas – medicine, horsetraining, or glassblowing, say – have skills and knowledge to offer in the reconstruction of past activities. An Egyptologist may be able to translate an ancient ship’s log effortlessly but be utterly clueless about sailing techniques!
Yes, look at career surveys for humanities majors at Penn. Here’s the survey for NELC.
I know several people who’ve gone into consulting from Egyptology, some of them undergrads and some of them frustrated graduate students. Since Egyptology programs in the US are at elite universities, they didn’t have too much trouble making the transition.
Yes, they’re fully funded.
Unfortunately, it’s quite common for Egyptology students to know very little (if any) Arabic unless they’ve been engaged in archaeological fieldwork in Egypt for several years. Acquiring the appropriate background in the various scripts and stages of the Egyptian language is very time-consuming, and on top of that they’re expected to know at least one other ancient language (e.g. Greek, Akkadian, or Hebrew) and the European languages used for scholarly publishing (French, German, Italian).
That said, Arabic is obviously useful. There are some difficulties involved in picking it up (it takes a few years to really hone one’s skills, and Egyptian Arabic is not often taught), but it expands one’s career options. The Critical Language Scholarship is an excellent opportunity (fully funded language study abroad!) but requires at least one year of prior Arabic study.
I think you have a perfectly good shot at a PhD program. Having at least 1 year of Middle Egyptian is a massive advantage in admissions, though not every program will admit to it, and 2 years is even better. Old Egyptian is very easy to learn with a solid grounding in Middle Egyptian; Late Egyptian is significantly different, however, so some exposure to Late Egyptian (preferably with hieratic training) would help set your application apart. Your exposure to Greek is helpful if you plan to focus on the later periods or papyrology.
Excavation experience, ANY excavation experience, looks good on a CV/resume. Getting permission to participate on a dig in Egypt is extremely difficult for undergraduates and even graduate students, and professors know that. Archaeological field schools are also frightfully expensive, obviously, and the few scholarships barely put a dent in the overall cost.
Your curatorial experience at the Penn Museum is a nice plus, and any volunteer or intern experience there would also bolster a PhD application. To tie everything together in a nice package, you’d need a very strong writing sample (a section of a senior thesis works best) and thoughtful, well-crafted personal statements that outline clearly your specific areas of interest in the field, your reasons for applying to each program, and why you think you’d be a good fit for each program.
A glaring weakness in your application, which could sink your chances if not rectified, is a seeming lack of reading knowledge of German or French. One must be able to read at least one of them for a solid shot at a good PhD program. If you decide to go the PhD route, spend some of your free time this summer learning German or French. Sandberg’s “German for Reading” and “French for Reading” books are superb and designed for humanities students.
If you decide not to go the PhD route…
You’ll land on your feet, just like most Penn graduates. Postmodern gave you very good advice in post #17. It may help you to start thinking of specific skills you bring to the table and then think about the careers that utilize those skillsets.
Also think about what exactly you find so interesting about Egyptology. Is it the brain puzzle of translating texts? Is it the country itself? Is it learning about other cultures? If you can isolate what interests you, you might find it easier to find other careers that would likewise challenge and satisfy you.
Humanities majors find gainful employment in many different fields, as homerdog pointed out. Also keep in mind that it’s increasingly common for people to switch careers at least once during their lifetime, and you are by no means “locked in” to a career (or lack thereof) this early! I doubt many of the older posters on this forum had the faintest idea as college students what their future career(s) would be.
As a rule of thumb, I tend to recommend a career in Egyptology, ancient history, or archaeology only to those who genuinely can’t picture themselves doing anything else. Even for those in graduate school, it’s best to cultivate desirable skills such as GIS experience, museum studies certification, etc.
Most Ivy league graduates land on their feet no matter what their major. According to the College Scorecard, Penn graduates have a very high median earnings of $78,000 ten years after matriculating at Penn.
Your major isn’t useless, but you need to take action ASAP and add elements to your profile and skillset that’ll make you employable. Start with the career center and Do what you are.
Thanks @Archaeologist. You were incredibly helpful. In your opinion, should I take an extra year or two? (keeping in mind that I’ve made it through 4 years without taking out loans but wouldn’t be able to avoid it if I did another year or two of undergrad)
About doing research as a hobby, are those who present at conferences ever allowed to have access to university libraries or do hands on research, like seeing artifacts and papyri? Because otherwise I don’t think that would leave me satisfied, because unless I had some big novel insight, I would have no new contributions to make, just rehashing what others have already found out. And what’s the attitude towards them, because I just figured in Egyptology it’s Ph.D, student or GTFO?
As for French and German, thanks for the recommendation, I’ve been looking for something to help me with reading but could not find anything.
Why I want to be an Egyptologist? I’m not sure. I do enjoy learning about the past and other cultures, but it’s only studying ancient Egypt that really gets my blood pumping, so I can’t see much about my passion that can be isolated and found to apply to other careers. All I can think of is teaching, but that would require as much time and more money to get certified, and the job market for teachers is almost as bad as academia.
And @MYOS1634, they had a fellowship to go along with the exhibition but I didn’t get it, and I’m not qualified for any of the student job openings in the museum. And it’s not that I refuse to work or do internships this summer, it’s that I can’t. Again, no access to the car and I don’t live anywhere close to public transportation lines, so I’m limited to my small town, and I can’t find anyone hiring who would let me work for just 2 months. I decided against finding a job or internship in Philly over the summer because I would spend at least as much I made at a job on food and rent, and an internship would have left me broke.
I already emailed the career center (actually before I even started this thread) and am going to schedule a call with them soon.
@MYOS1634 Also, my concern about seeing all my friends graduate is that due to past and current issues, it would not be beneficial, to say the least, for my mental health to spend a year in a position I would at least subconsciously see as shameful with absolutely no one in my life.
Can’t you make friends with sophomores and juniors? I’m sure there are quite a few who are interesting
You really need to meet with the career center : the goal of an internship isn’t to make money - you’re lucky if you’re even paid. Rather it helps you build your professional skills hence your resume, and allows you to know what you like and what you dislike.
I understand you can’t get an internship this summer, but you should have one next summer before your senior senior year. In the meanwhile, find any kind of odd job - a few hours at Walmart or a fast food joint or retail or painting… Not for your resume, but to see what skills you have or needbto acquire, and simply to get a sense of a work day.
Egyptology can lead you to lots of things but you have to think about yourself in ways you haven’t before.
Have you bought /borrowed Do what you are yet?
Borrowing a littkebis okay… How much would you borrow for a 5th year?
@MYOS1634 I know the purpose of an internship is to acquire skills and experience, but it would not be worth it for me to spend thousands renting a place in Philly over the summer just for that. And summer between senior year and super senior year, still nowhere close to being on board with that. And there are some underclassmen I’m friendly with, but I’ve seen a handful of super seniors and people hardly ever want to spend time with them because like I said, it’s seen as shameful to be a super senior plus a lot of the school’s social events are organized by class year, and being a super senior would put me in a class year all by myself. I checked out the book but was not interested since I already know I’m INFJ and the Myers-Briggs centered career stuff I’ve seen was never super helpful. I would borrow as much as I could repay in full within a few years of full time employment, but unfortunately with Penn’s tuition and the ridiculous interest rates on student loans that is impossible.
Different businesses/organizations do internships differently. I’m an intern at a local nonprofit this summer and it’s nothing like that; it’s not for an organization I plan on staying with and it doesn’t really match any of my future plans, but I’m getting the work experience and learning about what it takes to run an nonprofit. Who knows, maybe that experience will help me somehow in the future, even if not directly.
But I was just saying that any kind of employment, including that sitting behind the desk and getting coffee, will probably be helpful right now and I don’t think it’ll set you on a path you don’t want unless you choose to do so, so I was just saying not to rule it out necessarily, at least not right now o: That’s just some of the advice I got when I was seeking jobs this year.