Hello, I was wondering if anyone here has any advice for choosing a specialization? I'm going to transfer to a 4 year institution soon (currently in CC) and I have no idea which way I want to go.
I'm very interested in Russian history, ancient Greek history (classics in general), Early American History, Early Colonial history of North and South America, and Medieval European/East European history.
I know for sure that I would like to be a professional historian and I know for sure that I could specialize in many different areas but I just can't decide.
The obvious answer is of course to do what is most interesting but for me that doesn't work too well. I had thought about doing the area that is most inaccessible to a lay person or someone new to history and that would probably for most people be Medieval history but at the same time, I'm not very interested in Christianity as an academic subject which would of course be a big part of West European Medieval history, Russian, and East European medieval history. So, any advice?
Go to the institution and take a bunch of classes. It doesn't matter when you're an undergrad since you normally don't "specialize" in anything and it is likely that it won't matter to a graduate program if you spent a lot of time studying a specific subfield. A colleague of mine who is a medieval historian didn't even take a medieval class at his undergrad institution. This is a little strange, but it's possible.
Make sure you take languages though, at least French and German if you want to do non-Classical history. If you want to do Classical history, you should learn major in Classics and history or just Classics. You can take reading French and German when you get to grad school and they will be a breeze compared to the time you logged in undergrad. I guess the best advice I can give you is learn the language you will be using the most in your subfield. Obviously, you probably won't have a chance to learn something like old Church Slavonic or Byzantine Greek if you want to do the Medieval Eastern European route, but you can get a start with Russian and/or Classical Greek.