<p>I'm actually not totally sure about what I'm going to major in yet, but i'm leaning towards history... is the history department at Rice any good? Is it good in comparison to Georgetown? R the humanities at Rice any good in general?</p>
<p>ya they are pretty fun. ranking humanities programs is pretty useless i think. dont listen to them. you should prob visit if you havent and go to Zammito's European Intellectual History.</p>
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i'm leaning towards history... is the history department at Rice any good?
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History is a huge, broad field. Do you have a particular interest in terms of, for example, time span and/or area of the world? Some undergraduate major requirements in History are general, a menu of everything (which seems to be the case at Rice). Others start you off with general, then allow or require concentrations, and by doing a bit of basic research on the web, it's possible to identify strengths/weaknesses in specific fields by school.</p>
<p>Isn't there a bunch of foreign language requirements if you want a degree in history? Or is that only if you want to go into graduate school? The idea of having to become fluent in a foreign language seemed a little pointless to me when I want to focus on U.S. History with an emphisis on the early colonial period.</p>
<p>thats if you want to go get a phd. you dont have to be fluent in anything unless you major in it. ling is the closest you can get to languages and you can satisfy that with ap's alone.</p>
<p>Rice doesn't require a language other than English for a B.A. in History, but does say that it's desirable. French would probably be most useful for U.S. early colonial. For practical purposes, you don't have to achieve any fluency at all, though, merely be able to read.</p>