Took the GRE. Now what to study?

[Deep13]

680 verbal, 550 quantities. I'm going back to school for my masters in history in order to teach undergraduates. I have to decide what area to study. Whatever I choose comes with a foreign language requirement.

There are three main contenders: Latin American (Spanish & Portuguese), Middle East (Arabic and maybe Turkish) or China (Mandarin). The language requirement is for reading, not necessarily speaking or hearing. Middle East seems to be a field that's in demand since it is present day conflicts that create a demand among undergraduate students. I hear mixed things about Chinese. On the one hand I hear China's rising dominance in the world gives it increasing demand. OTOH, I hear that most schools are pretty limited in their Chinese departments and that there isn't much demand. Latin American was in demand in the 1960s and 70s but has been waning since then. OTOH the rise if Latino/as in this country may mean an increased demand in the future as more and more Latins in this country enroll in college. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much effort by schools to attract Latin American students.

My own personal interest is more ancient and medieval which favors Middle Eastern and maybe China to a lesser degree.

I'm just thinking out loud. Obviously, I have to decide for myself.

[mythology]

1. Is the goal to just get a job?

If so I would recommend the Middle East, probably mixing your history classes with a relevant class or two from political science if you can.

If the goal is to learn, then go with whatever interests you the most.

My own experience in grad school would say go with the latter. Unless your only goal is to teach undergrads, then I think it's more important to learn the things you want and remain open to the possibilities that the future holds. I have a bachelor's in history and a master's in political science but wound up working in IT.

One other thing to make sure you check, is prior to registering for classes, I'd really recommend meeting a professor and reading some of their work. You take a limited number of classes in grad school and having a crappy professor is awful. Of my 8 classes in grad school (I was able to bring in 2 classes) I had two professors I spent many an hour dreaming up creative and painful ways to help them shuffle off this mortal coil. One of them especially if I had read any of his writing I would have found to be an arrogant misogynist who really didn't know his stuff. Unfortunately I had to spend 4 months with the blithering idiot.

[Deep13]

4. Good thinking. Thanks.

My goal is to teach undergraduates or community college. The job market for humanities instructs sucks, so it is helpful to find an aea that is a little atypical, but still attracting students. The problem isn't finding something that is interesting because it all is. The problem is deciding what to leave out. I have been practicing law for 17 years and it really has not been a good experience. The study of history has always been my my greatest interest and I am trying to get back to it. I've met a few profs, but not all of the possible ones.

[Lucian]

2. Good scores.

I got the same. I start grad school in the fall for professional archaeology.

[Deep13]

5. Awesome. Do you have an anthropology undergraduate degree?

I was thinking of picking archaeology as a minor. History, as you know, is primarily the study of writing, so it has some pretty significant limits. Any study of western hemisphere history necessarily begins with Columbus, since no indigenous people (except the Mayans) were literate.

[Lucian]

10. I'll have my degree in Anthropology in August.

I have to finish a math class this summer before I get my degree. Then three weeks after that, I start grad school. :)

[struggle4progress]

3. I'm a math guy, with zip academic experience in the humanities, so really can't advise you about

job market. But being a pompous blowhard, I'll make the following remarks anyway

First, if there is the slightest possibility that you'll aim for an eventual PhD, then nothing is more important than studying something that really really interests you, because you will be looking at it until your eyes blur and water. That's less true for a masters, because you're done in a year or two

Second, if you're doing this for job prospects, then you should have a backup plan, because the academic humanities market is tight. Even with a history PhD, landing a job at an undergrad department might be hit-or-miss, though it's certainly true that some colleges hire MAs. I'm not saying you can't do this: I'm simply saying that you should train yourself flexibly, in case your original objective doesn't work out. You might find you have to make ends meet by doing (say) editorial or translation or cultural consulting work

So you might want to think carefully about what language you really want, and you might want to consider learning it pretty well. And period might matter to you: modern Arabic or Spanish or Mandarin might be more useful than (say) medieval Arabic. Even if your degree only requires reading knowledge, you might want to develop some speaking facility, and you might consider an immersion period abroad to improve your language skills

You might also consider looking (say) at some modern history that might have contemporary relevance. I'll throw out a possibility to try to help jumpstart your thinking -- without meaning that you should follow my particular suggestion: study (say) the modern history of some US immigrant population, with an eye to why people immigrated -- the early history of Chinatown in San Francisco, or American refugees from Pinochet's Chile, for example

[Deep13]

6. One of the reasons I'm considering Latin American...

...is because speaking Spanish will be helpful if I want to go back to my previous career as a lawyer.

[struggle4progress]

9. Cool! Why not consider some Latin American legal history?

History of law looks like fascinating stuff to me: for a while, for fun, I was reading old early English legal texts, reprinted by the Seldon society -- one could find old opinions that called "William the Conquerer" by the less-than-flattering title "William the Bastard," or long and convoluted cases about whether so-and-so was actually serf or freeman, with so-and-so saying his family had dwelt in such-and-such a city since before anyone could remember, whilst various alleged relatives testified that so-and-so had fled the land to which he was bound only a few years earlier

Land law, criminal law, human rights law -- there must be all manner of wonderful Latin American options

[Deep13]

11. Could be. I was actually thinking of Latin-Am. labor history.

The Norman invasion was devastating to the English population. The final chapter of 1066, The Year of Conquest goes into detail about why the invasion mattered and the ways in which the locals suffered under the Norman yoke.

[struggle4progress]

12. Latin American labor history would be a great topic!

Re England --William, as conquerer, faced some immediate political problems: in particular, the turmoil of the conquest led to some land-grabbing and score-settling, which threatened good order, so William almost immediately decreed that land-titles would be restored to their state "on the day that King Edward was alive and dead." If I recall aright, the matter lay there for some centuries: a land-title was good only insofar as it could be established as traceable to recognized holding on the day of Edward's death. As time elapsed, this allowed too much possibility for unsettling long-held claims by arguing about ancient history, and a more modern date was fixed, after which more modern claims were frozen by law. But it meant that the defeated English became an argumentative and litigating lot almost immediately: within a few decades of the conquest, there was a well-established legal industry with an extensive procedural vocabulary that may not be fully understood yet, due to the gaps in early records.

[petronius]

7. Sounds like you should study for the GRE

:P

Where are you planning to teach? When you say masters, I assume that means community college. Have you considered the job market and the lack of stability in that area? If you really like your topic, and with good GREs, would you consider holing up in grad school for a while longer to get the PhD?

[Deep13]

8. Yup.

1. master's
2. master's thesis
3. PhD courses
4. dissertation

The verbal is what matters for history. 680 is 96th percentile.