<p>I will graduate in May of 2014 with a bachelor's degree in English. I love my degree, but I also equally love history. My question is this: if I decide not to go to grad school for English literature, will I be able to go for history?</p>
<p>Yes, it’s totally doable! If you were an English major and wanted to get a Master’s in Calculus, that would be more difficult. In undergrad I studied English, and now I’m applying for grad for Student Affairs (Higher Education.) Sort of in the same field; not complete opposite ends of the spectrum. Also with an English degree, your acquired skill set is very large and can cover a variety of art/social/humanities areas. You might be required to take pre-reqs though.</p>
<p>Going from English to student affairs is completely different from going from English to history. Student affairs is designed for people who come from many different majors because there is no undergraduate student affairs/higher education major. History is not designed for people who come from different majors; it presumes a base knowledge of historical methods and theories. (Also, small nitpick…you cannot get a master’s in calculus. You can get a master’s in math, or statistics, but you’ll have needed to take calculus in college as that’s a freshman-sophomore level class.)</p>
<p>The short answer is yes, with some work. I would also argue that transitioning from English to history might be just as difficult, maybe more, than transitioning from English to math/statistics.</p>
<p>History is an extremely competitive field, both getting into graduate programs and getting jobs afterwards. So my first question is why do you want to get a graduate degree in history? If it’s just because you really love learning about history, stop, turn around, and get a library card. Spend many enjoyable years and months reading books and visiting museums. You don’t have to do for a career what you really love; there are other ways to explore those interests (I too love history, but I satisfy that love by reading widely and going to museums).</p>
<p>If you want to go to grad school in history because you want to work in history - either as a history professor or a public historian - I would also urge you to stop and think. There is a huge oversupply of people with MAs and PhDs in history, and there are not enough history professor positions or public historian positions for all of them. This is especially true if you are interested in the history of the U.S., Canada, or Western Europe. (If you are an African, Middle Eastern, or South Asian historian, apparently, the market is far kinder - but still not 100% kind). Very few history PhD recipients get tenure-track positions as history professors; many adjunct 8+ classes a year for less than $30,000 with no benefits and no office. Public history isn’t necessarily better, since those unemployed PhDs who wanted to be professors are going to clamor towards that as their next best thing.</p>
<p>Now, if you want to get an MA or PhD in history because history is your <em>burning passion</em>, and you really want to study it for 2-10 years, but you don’t mind if you can’t find a job in history afterwards - and, in the case of an MA, you don’t mind borrowing tens of thousands of dollars for it (because there are very few scholarships at the graduate level, and you’ll have to pay primarily with loans)…then, you still have some work to do.</p>
<p>-If your goal is a history PhD, you will have to get an history MA first. Even many people who majored in history in college still needed a history MA before they went on to a PhD, so a non-history major will almost definitely need one unless you have substantial coursework in history. And by substantial, I mean almost the equivalent of having done a double-major.
-If you want to get into a history MA program, then you probably just need to take around 5 history classes as a non-degree student.
-History PhD students usually need to demonstrate reading proficiency in two languages by the end of their coursework phase - usually between years 2 and 4 in their program. In order to do that, you usually have to have begun language study before you begin the PhD, so most history PhD programs will want to see you have substantial coursework in one language and at least begun a second by the time they admit you. Which languages you choose will depend on your region - if you’re doing Western Europe, for example, French and German are common. If you are doing North Africa, maybe French and Arabic. You get the idea. An MA program may require you to begin one language.
-History PhD programs will require a writing sample. An MA will be really useful for this because they will require you to write several papers over the course of the program. Some MA programs may also require a writing sample.</p>
<p>Lmao at MS in Calculus</p>
<p>Thanks for the replies. I am pretty sure that I want to teach British literature, so I will go for English. However, I do love history and sometimes think I would like to teach that on the collegiate level instead. This post was mainly out of curiosity, because I wondered if you could even do that.</p>