I was wondering, if the resident historians here could tell me something about the practical requirements of history, and generally about, what working in the field of history entails.
As an exaggerated example, i don't want to specialize in a field and then find it completely deserted, or it turning out to be nothing like i expected.
I am what could substitute a freshman in college (if i lived in the US), and I am really interested in working as a historian, specifically working working with maps (i adore maps, colonial maps, propaganda maps and ancient maps that look so wrong, you would think Pliny the elder had drawn them).
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Sorry if this is posted in the wrong subreddit.
I thank you in advance. :)
PS. if it matters, i live in Scandinavia.
EDit: to elaborate a bit further, i want to know some of the more practical sides of what historians do, because from an outside perspektive, it seems like the job revolves around writing books and talk in documentaries.
There's also /r/AskAcademia which might be helpful.
I'm going to assume you are Icelandic like myself. My biggest piece of advice would be to avoid Icelandic graduate school like the plague. Funding is extremely hard to get right now and in my experience Icelandic academics are not very competitive in a lot of areas (my experience is in mathematics though so your mileage may vary). Undergraduate is fine, but University of Iceland is at best an average institution (yes I know I'm being unpatriotic but it just is).
Your best bet would be to get into a Master's program in somewhere like Sweden, and then see where you want to go from there. I know people with history degrees from Stockholm and Gothenburg and they were very satisfied with the degree programs there.
I know the MR/HÍ crowd will try to convince you that there's no place like HÍ, but the simple fact is that the Icelandic higher education system has been in a sorry state since the crash, and things aren't going to be getting better anytime in the next few years.