In what sense? As in being a phd? Well, first and foremost, it require what one of my professors once said when I was an undergrad: this field requires a fire in the belly. Being a historian is not just "liking history." It is having the drive to dig as deep as you can to get as close to the truth as possible. We can probably never uncover the whole truth, but we strive to interpret the past as best we can. History, as my thesis advisor has said, is not a study of the past. The past is gone, and we can't get it back. History is an interpretation of the past through what we still have. It means being the tip of the spear in your area of focus. Staying current with other historians and their theories. Responding to those theories, and keeping the debate alive. It means being creative in your research, and putting your own interpretations out there. If you don't like writing, it is not the field for you. Depending on where you work, it can include some fun conferences across the globe, grading atrocious undergraduate papers that make you facepalm all night with a bottle, and hating the shite funding your department gets.

At our core, I guess we're storytellers. We study and write to try to carefully tell how and why people in the past lived as they did, and to make sense of the society around them. This involves A LOT of reading ourselves, and writing to share our findings with other people.

There are two main avenues of doing this. The more traditional is academia: pick a topic, pick a school/advisor, and pile up degrees as you gain expertise in your field. At some point, hopefully when you start your PhD, people start paying you to do the stuff that you've been doing for years. To get your PhD, you have to write and defend a book manuscript, which allows you to get a faculty position at a school. Most faculty positions come with a publishing requirement, so the rest of your career will be spent teaching students and producing an steady stream of books and articles.

The other major avenue is public history. While academics (infuriatingly) care mostly about writing to each other, public history looks to reach non-academics. The best-established way of doing this is through museums. This method tends to be more focused on a more specific event or place, though some museums tackle bigger themes. Public historians are more likely to use material culture as a way of telling stories as part of their job. Some towns/counties/states have a dedicated historian on staff, as do some companies. This kind of work is usually a bit more focused on who did what and where they did it, rather than answering sweeping systematic questions ("How did capitalism affect the formation of race? How did race affect the development of capitalism?" That kind of thing).

If you have any more specific questions, please ask!