Careers in History

History majors represent roughly 1.5 percent of all American college graduates, but are overrepresented in the leadership ranks of nearly every field imaginable, from business, journalism, law and politics to the military, diplomacy, communication, criminal justice and beyond.

Why? Those who study the past as undergraduates tend to excel in their careers because of the wide range of transferrable and perennially in-demand skills developed in the history major. These include:

• synthesizing and organizing large amounts of information;
• making sense out of the seemingly nonsensical;
• analyzing contemporary developments through a historical lens;
• communicating clearly and effectively orally and in writing;
• formulating apt questions and answering them by means of deep, effective research;
• constructing forceful and persuasive arguments by means of various methodologies, approaches, and source analyses;
• understanding and appreciating complexity and ambiguity;
• demonstrating awareness of how social, political, and economic structures interact with individuals and groups to effect change;
• evaluating a broad range of perspectives;
• accumulating wisdom from the breadth of human experience and applying it, as warranted, to solving problems of the present day; and
• using the past to explain the process of innovation and the significance of choices that humans have made and could make in the present to affect the future.

Of course, studying history is great for academic and teaching careers, but check out why history majors make such good: