<p>I'm still in high school (a junior), but I'm researching possible paths for my education and I'm seriously considering a PhD in history at the moment. I love, love, love history, but what can you really do with a PhD in it besides teach?</p>
<p>I do not know what you can do, but I do know it is very very hard to find a job.</p>
<p>While it’s good to make plans, you’ve got some time at this point. As wildwood888 mentioned, academic job prospects for History PhDs (indeed, all humanities PhDs) are not good. </p>
<p>That said, when you finally defend your diss. and are awarded the PhD (best case, that’s about 11 years from now) you will have a big batch of skills that, oddly enough, are in demand outside of academia. You’ll have researched and written <em>many</em> long papers (25-50 pages) with enormous bibliographies not to mention your book length dissertation, you’ll be able to read at least two foreign languages, you’ll likely have made at least a couple presentations at conferences and become comfortable analyzing and discussing minute details of obscure events. You’ll have developed relationships, both academic and personal with other scholars around the world and aquired a sensitivity to and ability to work productively with people from a wide variety of backgrounds.</p>
<p>Every large business and government agency needs those skills. You’ll do your search with terms like “research analyst” and if you’ve got that PhD you’ll be adding terms like “senior” and “leader”.</p>
<p>Believe it or not, there are even historian jobs at both the federal and state level too. For the government side, there are some links here: [Public</a> History Employment](<a href=“http://www.historians.org/governance/tfph/PublicHistoryEmployment.htm]Public”>Careers in Public History | AHA)</p>
<p>You’ve got plenty of time - and don’t let the kids obsessed with engineering and the sciences here on CC get you down about something you won’t have to worry about for another decade or more.</p>
<p>You’ve got a long time to decide. The PhD will ALWAYS be there. You can’t just “love” history. What you are doing at high-school level is completely different from what you’ll do at undergraduate and graduate level. Right now, you are being asked to memorize facts, names, and dates, as well as make sense of the events that happened. At undergraduate level, you will do a bit more of all that plus some basic analytical and research papers. You can still “love” history in a way that you will do well in your major.</p>
<p>However, graduate school is a different ballgame. It should be natural to like history. But you are no longer <em>just</em> memorizing facts and learning. You are nit-picking sources (like Declaration of Independence or a newspaper article published in France in 1848 or an oral history transcript from a Cambodian genocide survivor) and interpreting them to death with other people. You will be thinking more abstractly as you create a combination of different sources that you will find in different archives to create your own conclusion of what happened. You will also have a specific focus or angle on your research like from a gender or a race perspective. </p>
<p>For a lot of people, this is all totally over-thinking and over-analyzing of events that should be simple in the first place. But for professors and history graduate students, it’s nothing but pure entertainment to take apart an event and understand in depth how it happened and why it did and understand the long term consequences.</p>
<p>Still want the PhD? Then get serious in your foreign language classes. 
You will thank yourself later.</p>
<p>Latin, Greek, Arabic all good to know how to read for your future in History(pun intended)</p>
<p>I actually disagree about Latin/Greek, unless you want to study the ancient world – and classics actually probably has the worst job prospects of any field in history, and that’s saying something. Arabic is only useful if you want to study the Middle East or North Africa, otherwise it’s not helpful. </p>
<p>The major research languages are English (which you clearly already know), French and German, and Spanish to a lesser degree. Basically, the languages of the countries that colonized other nations for a few hundred years. So take one of those instead, since it will be more helpful no matter what area/time period you want to study.</p>
<p>Most reputable doctoral programs require that you have a reading knowledge of one foreign language in which a lot of scholarship is published. That is true even for US History concentrators. Usually, that means French or German, sometimes Spanish. Many require you to have an additional language or even two but it depends what history subfield you are in. </p>
<p>You have a long way to go. Just keep taking history and see how you feel about it. If you can, get some practical museum experience, even part-time volunteer. That way you begin building a background for a track outside traditional teaching.</p>
<p>Another option…focus your history AND language on a field that is in “demand” by the government like Chinese or Arabic or Korean. That way you have another possible track for jobs.</p>