Hello, everyone! I have a meeting tomorrow with one of my old professors and a dean at the school I received my undergrad degree from. They are offering me a tuition waiver under the Holmes Master’s Program for an M.S. in Education.
My goal is to become a tenure-track faculty member in History at a university, and I am wondering if going through this program would be more of a boon or a hindrance in achieving that goal. Considering that my school is a small, public liberal arts college in New England and that I received my undergraduate degree there, would this program further my career goal?
Thanks in advance!
More qualified people will jump in but you will need a PhD for tenure track positions. Are you using this Master’s to help prepare for future PhD work? Maybe you could teach at a community college but they still would probably prefer a graduate degree in history over education.
Yes, I would essentially use my time getting my Master’s as a time to publish more and bulk up my CV. I published and presented a history paper during my undergrad and presented it and another paper at conferences. Still, I want to prove that I am capable of doing graduate level work. It’s close, so I could live at home, save money and maybe publish a few articles and present more. Would that make it easier to get into a good Doctoral program?
Why would you get an MS in education, though? Education master’s degrees are most commonly used to prepare people to be K-12 teachers, or occasionally to work in educational policy or administration at the K-12 level. Seems to me that the best preparation would be an MA in history or a closely related field (like American studies, Middle Eastern studies, etc.)
I don’t think you should do this just because it’s free; it’s an investment of your time and energy. You could just as easily take two years “off”, work part-time or full-time and use that time to polish another paper for publication or take a language or something. If you want to prove you’re capable of graduate-level work, you can take some graduate-level history courses as a non-degree student.
But no, an MS in education won’t necessarily make it easier to get a PhD in history…if anything, you’d have to explain why you want a PhD in history.