When I was around 8 or 9 years old I somehow came across the graphic novel Maus. It's a fantastic book, still one of my favorites, and a very intense story, particularly if you happen to be around 8 or 9 years old.

It's a bit morbid, but I became obsessed with understanding how people are capable of being so terrible to each other. More than 20 years and a masters degree later I'm still not sure that I've found a satisfactory answer to the question.

If you are planning on pursuing history as a career, I recommend that you do some soul-searching and determine what exactly it is about history that you like. If you enjoy teaching others about it, you might want to look into becoming a teacher. If you like writing, researching, and contributing to what we know, being a professor might be a fitting career. If you enjoy physical interaction and artifacts, archaeology might be ideal.

On the other hand, each choice also comes with potential downsides. If you go into education, you have to be prepared to teach people who likely don't have the same passion for it that you do. That can be immensely disheartening to some people. If you're looking into academia, you have to prepare yourself for a very bleak and competitive job market.

In the end, this is really a question you must decide for yourself. I wish you luck.

I hung around with a looter one summer, and I helped him steal First Nations artifacts from recorded and unrecorded archaeological sites up and down the British Columbia coast. I got so interested in the history of Native peoples that I went to university to study archaeology...whereupon I learned that stealing shit without recording its provenience was just about the worst thing a person could do to the historical record. Now I spend my time as a professional archaeologist trying my best to do justice to the science. Nevertheless, as a result of my misspent youth, I seriously kick ass at finding new, unrecorded archaeological sites.

I became a history major in college; switched over from biology because I fond memorizing cell diagrams boring and reading/writing history was exciting. I managed to get hired as a public historian between my junior and senior years in college, which was a great experience doing real research for pay. After graduating I took a job in archives and started a historic resources consulting firm on the side with some friends; we did National Register nominations, historic resource inventories for municipalities, interpretive design, you name it-- basically got work by underbidding all the real professionals by 25-30% because we had no overhead (we worked out of our apartments and had no support staff).

After a couple of years of that I went to grad school, did two MAs and a Ph.D., and landed a tenure-track position at a liberal arts college while still writing my dissertation. I've been there ever since, closing in on 20 years. My path was fairly traditional, save the experience I gained as a college student and the consulting work I did in my early 20s with just a BA.

If you're interested in paths other than traditional academe (which is becomming nearly impossible to achieve) the American Historical Association's guide to careers in history is a good place to start.

My girlfriend broke up with me.

I was 18, had been seeing this girl for about a year. First girlfriend (I'm a late bloomer) and came home from a trip visiting family. She dumped me right away. I was devastated. So like a good nerd I went to the bookstore and asked them for something new. They gave me Colleen McCullough's First Man in Rome. Before reading that book I thought I hated history, but with this bit of fiction, I started to understand people in the past didn't understand their world any more than I understand mine - it's a constant struggle. A couple of months later I went to college and enrolled in Latin and that was it.

Thanks, Jessica!

Its quite funny actually. Growing up my dad who wasn't around a lot used to watch tons of war movies, and the history channel's "History on Film" with anne medina. That coupled with the comic books like Sgt. Rock and Haunted Tank, and later video games; sparked my passion for history. I really hit it off in my social studies classes and I was convinced I was going to teach highschool social studies to carry that same passion and love of history to others.

Going through my B.A in history though I slowly lost the drive to want to teach children, I wanted to directly study history. It takes some time to sit down and have the talk with yourself if you want to commit to a masters or PhD. It takes alot of time, and you need a certain area that fascinates and drives you. You have to find creative ways in making money directly through history, or resolve yourself to teaching. Blueblarg put it well.

I drifted into archaeology. I started off with an interest in evolution, then zeroed in specifically on human evolution and so decided I wanted to do a degree in anthropology. In the UK a lot of universities conventionally only offer anthropology and archaeology together, so even though at that point I thought archaeology was a bunch of dullards with an unhealthy interest in pots, that's what I ended up doing. Over the course of my undergraduate degree I spent most of my time on cultural anthropology, but in the end decided that ethnographic fieldwork wasn't for me, whereas I'd done a couple of archaeological excavations and loved it, so I settled on archaeology for my postgraduate research. Thankfully by that point I'd realised it wasn't a discipline of artefact fetishists, and that it gave me the scope to mix my interests in evolution, culture and history.

The point being, in archaeology (and I assume most other academic disciplines) you meet a lot of people who have been obsessed with the field since the age of 5 and always knew it's what they wanted to do, and you can easily get the impression that single-minded drive is the only way to get ahead. But it doesn't have to go like that at all. Just pick whatever you're most interested in at every stage and you can't go far wrong.

I didn't want to be a doctor and I liked my anthropology classes and I took an intro to archaeology class and decided that's what I wanted.

Immerse yourself. Go to a respected school and do well. Get hired by a university or a museum, or possibly the govt and ply your trade.

Otherwise just read a lot and love it as a hobby like the rest of us and pay the bills with a better idea.