<p>well i'm still in high school so some of my questions may seem ill-informed but work with me.</p>
<p>if a kid graduates from a third tier university is it significantly harder for him to get into a top masters program than a kid who went to a first tier?</p>
<p>what kind of GPA and GRE scores would a person need to get into a top program?</p>
<p>what else is expected of a student to get into a top history program, like extra curricular wise?</p>
<p>that's all i can think of for now... thanks for your time :)</p>
<p>third tier university - provided you have an excellent GPA and some research to present you should do fine. There is a trickle down effect in academia - almost no matter where you go for undergrad, there will likely be professors who have come from top-tier universities. You want to seek those professors out, do research under them, ideally publish or present, and get your LORs from them. </p>
<p>GPA and GRE - not nearly as important as when getting in to undergrad. GPA is more important than GRE. Keep GPA above 3.5 and shoot for something above the 600s in the Quant/Verbal sections. Be aware of what the graduate language requirements are in your field. Most top programs will typically require 2 modern languages in addition to English. IMHO, German is your best modern language bet as an undergrad unless your field has an obvious preferred language.</p>
<p>ECs are pretty much irrelevant unless they are things like helping organize a conference, editing an undergrad. journal and the like.</p>
<p>The most important thing you can do is find some research opportunity with a professor (or independent with supervision). Then do your best to get published, even if only in an undergrad journal or as a poster at a conference. That sort of thing gives adcoms the confidence that you not only have enthusiasm for the subject but also the skills to do the research and write up the results.</p>
<p>Actually, master's programs generally don't require foreign languages. It's the PhD programs that do. You"ll need a decent GRE, a GPA of at least 3.0, and excellent recs. ECs do not matter at all.</p>
<p>More importantly, why are you worried about this in high school? Wait until you are at least a soph in college to start thinking about this - history in college is nothing like history in high school.</p>
<p>what kind of research does a history major do? for a science major it seems pretty obvious that they do experiments and try to discover stuff, but for a history major? like the only thing i could see is doing enough research on a topic to write something real major on it... is that what you guys mean?</p>
<p>also, i know high school is a bit early to start thinking about this but i intend to plan ahead of time. ;)</p>
<p>History is not unlike Classics in this regard. </p>
<p>Probably the easiest (though often time-consuming) type is the literature survey. This is sort of a "state of the art" summary about a particular (often very small) topic. In some sense, this is also what the first chapter of a PhD thesis often looks like.</p>
<p>In Classics we have a very limited quantity of primary sources - obviously there aren't new manuscripts being turned up every week. However, there is a lot of material sort of sitting around unpublished in museum store rooms. If you're lucky enough to go to a university that was part of the great wave of ummm... "discovery" in the late 19th/early 20th century that stuff is a MAJOR source of research material.</p>
<p>Then there is re-analyzing existing material. It has to be done every couple generations and quite often these days you'll be able to drag developments in other disciplines. Believe it or not, Philologists and Archaeologists never used to talk. Now we have a big annual meeting together!</p>
<p>And there are always things floating around that just haven't been looked at closely. Again, often from the last century, they were filed and forgotten.</p>
<p>For more recent history, primary sources abound and again inter-disciplinary approaches are often very productive. </p>
<p>And whatever you do doesn't have to be big. In Classics you can very successfully write publishable articles on just a few lines of text. </p>
<p>Its fun, and you get to hang out in libraries and museum store rooms and study stuff nobody has looked at in (sometimes) a hundred years or more!</p>
<p>The one thing I would add is that most top schools do not have history masters only programs so be aware of which do and which don't. Also just a masters in history is not going to open many professional doors, you need a Ph.D.</p>
<p>More importantly, why are you worried about this in high school? Wait until you are at least a soph in college to start thinking about this - history in college is nothing like history in high school.
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<p>What of GPAs like 2.98 or 2.99, a 0.01 gap makes a difference?</p>
<p>It depends on the program. If a program lists a specific minimum GPA, then yes, anything below that will be put to the side - they'll likely send you a letter recommending you take some grad classes at large and get a decent GPA in those. Programs range from requiring a minimum 2.5 to 3.0. Many don't list a minimum, but if you have below a 3.0, you'll have to have a really good app otherwise to make up for it.</p>