Hi! I'm a high school student in my last year (Canada) with some questions about potential career pathways in history, and what I can do to get there.

I have always found myself incredibly frustrated with the way history is approached in high school and in the popular mind, and I am thoroughly unsatisfied with the chain-of-events way that we popularly engage with history. I worry that we are not engaging with our past in a way which allows us to understand how our cultural narratives both then and now influence our perception and use of history, and I want to do something about it. I want us, as a population, to develop the tools to think critically and analyse the past through a variety of approaches, from gender to geography, rather than seeing history as a laundry list of dead people, stereotypes, and military battles.

In short, I am interested in delving deeper into history and hopefully using my future expertise to engage with regular people (I also kind of have a nerdy hard-on for society in Ancient Rome). Unfortunately, I'm not quite sure how to go about it.

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One of the more obvious pathways people talk about is moving into research and Professordom. While I am GREATLY interested in this pathway, I have heard again and again that the academic job market is pitiful and fiercely competitive. What is the experience, from graduation to landing the job, actually like? What can I do to get a leg up in this competitive atmosphere? How can I best access research/publishing opportunities as early as possible?

And how proficient do most grad programs want you to be in the languages relevant to your study? I know I'll likely have to squeeze in a ton of language classes during undergrad.

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Another possibility I am thinking about is simply becoming a high school teacher. Teachers in my province are paid well (although the market is also quite competitive), and I was hoping that teaching history to adolescents could help provide these kids a solid, critical foundation for their future pursuits, whether in academia or something as simple as voting or buying the groceries. I guess I could also use my spare summers to go the popular publishing route and write some books or something.

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Unfortunately, beyond those two options, I'm not sure what else is out there for me. What am I missing?

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Thank you so, so much.

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