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I know people who have never worked in certain fields who used getting masters in that field to change careers. Prior experience in a field isn't required, especially for a subject like history.
This is true. A master's in one of the liberal arts (social science, humanities, mathematics, and science) is not a professional degree. An MBA, MHA, or MPA is best for those who have experience in the field because those are management degrees. Master's degrees in the liberal arts are research degrees. Even some professional, graduate degrees don't require experience. You don't need experience as a counselor before starting a counseling program. You'll get the experience during your practicum and internship in your master's program. The same applies for occupational therapy, physician assistant studies, etc.
How about subscribing to a real historical journal and reading that instead of popular historical texts? Masters in history for personal enrichment is a silly thing. There is nothing about history that you cannot learn on your own. Unless you need a university holding a learning hoop for you to jump through, what's the point? Keep it as a hobby.
How about subscribing to a real historical journal and reading that instead of popular historical texts? Masters in history for personal enrichment is a silly thing. There is nothing about history that you cannot learn on your own. Unless you need a university holding a learning hoop for you to jump through, what's the point? Keep it as a hobby.
The research process, historiography, contextualization, theory, how to write up your research, etc... that you would learn in a history MA program is not easy to learn on your own. Knowing where to start takes mentorship; learning how to be an historian is more like an apprenticeship.
In the journals you will see the work of existing practitioners - people who have gotten that mentorship. It's possible to reverse engineer professional articles and scholarly books in order to figure it out how to do it on your own, but someone without a history background would probably get lost quickly, distracted by things the field has moved on from years ago. He needs to know how to recognize that. Since the OP has only been reading popular books or history books from the public library, I suspect he does not have a clear idea what the field even entails.
But if he wants to get started... I'd suggest "The History Teacher," "Journal of American History," and "American Historical Review."
Those are not patently ridiculous suggestions at all. CIA analyst and State Dept. employee ARE careers history majors are qualified for, especially when combining history with area studies of some kind (China, Russia/E Europe/Central Asia, Near East, Cuba/Latin America). As an academic advisor in one of those fields, I've worked with CIA recruiters, and I can tell you that that is one major that's marketable to the gov't security agencies. Not that there's a lot of student demand to apply to those agencies, but your professor was right on. Instead of blowing off knowledgeable adults, you should take their advice and learn from them.
I'm thinking that the history majors who get CIA analyst and state department jobs are more likely to have had graduate level work in history AND/or area studies. As in MA or phd degrees.
A history major who doesn't go to grad school does not have many job options available, or at leas the job options that are available often don't require a college degree.
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