<p>With it being summer time, you guys are the only ones I can ask questions to!! </p>
<p>I was wondering how taking an internship at a museum would look on my application for grad school? There are two history museums around my area, and I have been looking at applying for an internship. Will it look good or effect my application at all?</p>
<p>Also, how should I go about trying to find research experience for my application? Who do I need to talk to and what do I need to say?</p>
<p>You guys have been awesome at answering my questions!! Thank you all!!</p>
<p>It depends on your field. If you are going for something like archaeology, field work experience is absolutely required; whereas if you are doing historiography, you better spend your summer reading journals and books suggested by your mentor. </p>
<p>Research experience in humanities is very hard to define. We don’t really work in labs unless we are going to do some big projects such as editorial works or cranking out books. In any case, your museum internship will be great on your application. But overall, it will have little impact on the admission committee’s decision. The most important part of humanities graduate school admission are in this order: writing sample, recommendation, statement of purpose, foreign languages, course work, GPA, C.V (where you will write your work experiences), and lastly, GRE.</p>
<p>Go for the museums. Get some insight on what it’s like to work in public history and see how a graduate degree is used in that area. Besides, it’ll all make you even more of a history junkie if you can stand the work!</p>
<p>Research experience in history is usually defined by working with original and primary sources (aka archives, interviews, newspapers) in which culminates into a paper presenting and analyzing your findings. </p>
<p>BTW- doing historiography is more about researching the patterns of findings, analyses, and theories over time and putting it all together and evaluating historians’ perspectives in relative where the field is going. So it’s not “research” per say that graduate school will look for.</p>
<p>@Tickle</p>
<p>You are my hero. You always have GREAT answers and I really do appreciate it! What do you suggest I do about my language requirements? I will have 12 hours of French (4 classes) and I might be able to sneak in 3 hours of German. I know that this is way below what I need, but do you have any suggestions on what I can do to strengthen my application?</p>
<p>Hugh problem for me is that my school does not offer Greek or Latin. Wanting to go into Ancient/ Classics… possibly Medieval… I know I need those languages. What can I do?</p>
<p>What year are you in?</p>
<p>Take your French up to literature level so you can get quite comfortable reading the language and then at the same time, you can begin your German. I would be prepared to do a LOT of studying for German because the language doesn’t recognize gender simply by the ending of the word as opposed to Romance languages. So you need to be in a position where you’re comfortable enough with French that you can skimp on the work a little to work at your German.</p>
<p>As for Latin and Greek, I would consider doing an intensive summer program (My vote would be Latin), and apply to a post-bac program such as Penn’s (WilliamC, our regular Classics expert, did his stint there). If your school doesn’t have Classics at all, you’ll be better served to enter in a post-bac program to give you the rigorous training that you need in order to be competitive for MA and PhD programs. </p>
<p>As I said to another poster in a similar thread, really look at yourself 3-5 years from now. Can you see yourself spending a year or two after graduation working to polish your PhD application where the chances of things not working out being relatively high? If you truly love history, you will do it, regardless of the outcome.</p>