Work as a bona fide historian, archaeologist, or anthropologist typically requires a PhD, which takes about 5-9 years of graduate training, entails a lot of initial job insecurity, and is not at all for the faint of heart. Statistics are somewhat meaningless, since nobody really knows what the job market will look like a decade from now, which is based on institutional changes in academia, government spending, and a host of other factors.

That said, an undergrad degree in history or anthropology/archaeology is a great way to go. (Archaeology falls under anthropology at all but a handful of departments in the US.) If this is a degree that truly interests you, it'll keep you engaged in the classroom, you'll get more learning for your buck, and you'll graduate sooner and save more money than your peers who think they have to try pre-med or engineering, only to find out that they hate it. Less than 40% of students graduate in four years, so just getting out of college, regardless of degree, will put you ahead of 60% of your peers. (Most "four-year" statistics actually show how many people graduate from "four-year" colleges within six years: look closely!)

Humanities degrees (such as history or anthropology) are often faulted as degrees that don't prepare you for a job. This is patently false. You can teach, you can work for museums and archives, you can do contract archaeology, you can do social analysis for networking and commercial firms, you can facilitate charity and NGO work. In short, the world is your oyster. Humanities programs give their students the analytic skills and communications techniques they need to succeed in any number of career paths, especially since so much job-relevant training is necessarily done on-the-job in any number of fields.

Don't be scared by job rates for the year after graduation, which are not at all a measure of a lifetime of success and personal satisfaction. Humanities students do often lag behind their peers for a year or two. But when they do find the right job, they tend to be well-prepared for it, and within a few years many of them are earning more than their STEM-y peers. Moreover, they've got the critical thinking and the cultural sensitivity to recognize the contributions they can make to their communities, and many of them do so.

So for practical recommendations, take a diverse sampling of classes. Find the department that you want to work in, where the people you meet are your kind of people: they'll be training you to be more and more like themselves. If it's history or anthropology -- great! -- dive right in. If it's elsewhere, then that's best to figure that out as soon as possible. And learn a foreign language. It's a requirement for serious study in almost any humanity field, and if you end up elsewhere, it's an extra card in your pocket that will open doors for internships and summer study and make you that much more valuable for potential employers. But most importantly, do what makes you feel happy and satisfied and settle for nothing less!

If you want to get paid to "study and hypothesize" about Europe, the State Department employs lots of analysts to keep on top of what is going on in different countries. So do investment firms, NGOs, oil companies, religious organizations, and militaries. Mixing in econ or poli sci would help a lot for that path.

Some skills you should consciously develop during your training if you are concerned about marketability outside of academia:

. handling primary sources in multiple languages

. preparing authoritative and clear descriptions of events and concepts for general and specialist audiences

. learning to patiently consume enormous quantities of data that is utterly boring at the time

/u/textandtrowel 's advice is good if you only want to finish a 4 year degree. If you're set on doing historical / anthropological research, however, you'll almost certainly have to get graduate training.

I'm in the US, and can't speak as well to the state of the international market if you're in a different part of the world. Here, there's a glut of PhDs on the market - something like twice as many in European history as there are jobs available. It's not an ideal situation. Nevertheless, recent hiring data published by the AHA suggests that most people with a history PhD find employment doing history (half in tenure-track research/teaching jobs, about a quarter in part-time teaching, and a quarter in non-academic / alt-ac careers: http://www.historians.org/jobs-and-professional-development/career-diversity-for-historians/the-many-careers-of-history-phds ). And in the past few years, there has been a slight increase in the number of job ads seeking European history PhDs. This may, of course, change in the next decade - you have to gamble.

If you're set on doing research, you'll most likely need to get a PhD. To get a PhD, you'll probably have to get an MA first (unless you get lucky enough to be accepted straight into a PhD program out of undergrad, in which case you'll get your MA along the way). An MA takes two years on paper (sometimes longer, if life throws you a curveball). Add the PhD, and you're looking at a national median time to degree (from first entering grad school) of 9 years (with 40% of PhDs taking more than 10 years to finish: http://mlaresearch.commons.mla.org/2014/05/14/opportunity-costs-of-the-phd-the-problem-of-time-to-degree/ ). This makes planning in advance for the job market challenging.

You can shave years off this time by completing a PhD in the UK (where MAs often take only a year, and PhDs 3 years - on paper), but if you're an American you'll probably have to pay out of pocket, and a history degree is not worth that kind of crippling debt (especially when you can expect to be paid - not well, but usually enough to eat - to get the degree in the States). The UK degrees take less time because they throw you into your research much more quickly, and you take fewer courses. This is a tradeoff, though, as the time you save avoiding coursework means less time spent building general knowledge (you jump straight into your specialization), and many American jobs are looking for PhDs with enough general knowledge to teach a wide variety of subjects (especially in European History). Accepted wisdom among my peers (though I don't have hard data to back this up) is that UK PhDs often have trouble getting jobs in the states because they're too specialized.

If you want to pursue a graduate degree in European history, the most important thing you can do to prepare now is to learn languages. If you were to study medieval European history, you'd need Latin (or Greek, depending on your topic), and at least two modern languages (often French and German, but this varies depending on what specifically you plan to study). If modern Europe, you'll need to know the languages in which the documents you'll be using for your research are written, and have enough fluency to get around the countries where they're stored. You can - and will - work on your languages during your graduate training, but your odds of getting accepted into a good program with a good funding package (which will cover your tuition, rent, and hopefully food) will be significantly higher if you've done a lot of preparation in advance. I was accepted to my PhD program directly out of undergrad because I had good Latin, German, and French already, with a bit of Old English. A colleague also was accepted, with funding, straight from undergrad, with Greek, Latin, and fluent Russian. A colleague whose languages were poor, however (basic Latin, and that's about it), was only accepted to the MA program, and had to pay out of pocket. If you're serious about grad school in European history, you need to start your language training now, and be diligent about it because you'll have to actually use the languages for your research and (probably) pass examinations in your reading proficiency to advance within your graduate program.

You'll also need letter writers to write you recommendations when you apply to graduate programs. A typical US grad school will require three letters from your professors. These need to be faculty, not graduate students (at my school, many of the history classes are taught by TAs like me). We can't write you letters, because we haven't finished grad school yet and can't claim to be qualified in evaluating your potential for a PhD program until we've at least finished one ourselves. But a professor who doesn't know you very well also won't feel comfortable writing you a letter. So if your school has a lot of history classes that are taught by TAs, be sure that you take classes with some of the actual faculty - at least three - and work on forming relationships with these professors so that, when it comes time to ask them to write you letters, they can have a lot of positive things to say. That means talking to them after class, taking advantage of their office hours, and of course turning in interesting work that they'll remember in a few years.

I can't speak with authority of the process for anthropology/archaeology (which, in the US, are almost always in the same department), except that the degree usually takes longer to complete, and that a PhD seems to be even more necessary than with a history degree if you want to use your anthro degree to do thoughtful work within the field. In the UK, a lot of my archaeology friends who only have a BA are working in commercial units, which means spending a lot of time living out of a suitcase and following construction crews around making sure they don't dig up anything important and, if they do, frantically excavating it as quickly as possible before the site is paved over. It's hard work and poorly compensated, and usually takes a lot of (unpaid) experience before they'll hire you. And there's little room for hypothesizing (for that, you probably need a university job, and a PhD).

Pursue a graduate history degree if you enjoy it - you'll get to do some crazy in depth research, will probably be able to find a grant that will fund exciting research travel around Europe, and will come out of it with a better appreciation of how humans fit into our world. But don't do it if your primary objective is employment - history PhDs get jobs, but you'll save yourself 10 years of poverty if you enter the job market straight out of undergrad, skip the PhD, and read history books in your free time. Only go for a history degree if the degree itself is your goal, poverty and other sacrifices be damned.

First of all, english is not my first language and I apologize if this post seems irrelevant.

History has always been a huge interest of mine, although I have always felt that studying it might not lead to any jobs. Years of grubbling led me to the conclusion that "to hell with it, i'll study what catches my interest".

Now I have gotten accepted into a 3 year of historical studies program. During that time I will compliment with 1 years of studies in archives science which is focused on being able to work as an archivist. That way I am making my history studies more "safe" for getting a job in the future I would think.

So how about History teachers, are they more wanted these days? Is there future for them?

If you're talking an undergrad degree in History you are probably on your way to graduate school of some sort before you work. That's what my wife did. Got an MBA after a BA History.