I'm not sure whether this is the right place to ask in the first place, but I figured I'd shoot my shot since it does not seem to be against the rules. So here are my questions:
How is your job? What exactly do you do? How did your semesters look; what did you do in them? Would you recommend it?
I've been looking around and archeology sounds inredibly fascinating, but I'm not too sure if I don't have a really romantized view of it. Please tell me about your personal experiences, both good and bad.
Thank you
This question is absolutely fine here, but you could also consider posting it to our sister sub r/AskAnthropology.
Studied archaeology as part of a classics program in my undergrad. Did field work in Greece and in the US. Greek work was mostly overland survey. Pretty interesting work. Travel was great. Met lots of cool people. Found some fun artifacts and mapped out some cities and forts that no one had fully published in English.
US work was less exciting. The most lucrative was working pre-highway work on right-of-ways. Just digging test holes all day to see if we were going to hit burials. Boring, hard work. Also worked on a stationary dig which was a little better, but got pretty old too.
The intellectually interesting stuff was the lab work, the planning, and the management of the projects. I did some methodology testing in Greece and helped write up some reports. That was pretty fun and challenging. In the US work, nobody wanted my input with only a BA for anything but labor (which was a big waste of a BA).
Looked into grad school. Decided I didn't really want to learn three new languages* in a 7 year PhD program for tenuous job prospects in a shrinking academic field. Eventually went in an entirely different career direction.
(*) at the time, it was normal for programs to want you to know English, Greek, Latin, French and German to go far in classical archaeology. I already had Latin and English, but didn't look forward to trying to learn three more by the time I finished my masters.
I’m just finishing my BA. My semesters involved a good mix of theory (a LOT of theory), and some practical - gotta learn how to ID, classify, and handle them artifacts - and as of now I work in CRM in Canada. It’s hot as hell and physically demanding, and there’s not a lot of reward, but I enjoy it, so I guess there’s that. Moving further in the field would involve at least a masters degree, to be able to obtain a license to be a field director or to do any of the research.
I would suggest doing a field school. It's a great way to see if you actually enjoy the work and could count as credit toward your degree if you end up deciding you like it. The field school I attended was aimed at students beginning their masters program and gave us survey, dirt, and research experience.
As for my personal experience, I completed my masters degree, but ended up working in a different field just due to life circumstances.