Is there hope for me to become a historian ?? I was just an average student in high school with a low b average I’m 17 and a senior now and I’ve always wanted to be a lawyer but then I realized history was really in my hart is there any hope left for me I have a 2.4 gpa

by jackuno1917
jschooltiger

Assuming you can get into college, at least a good state school, your high school GPA has absolutely nothing to do with your prospects for graduate school, which is generally speaking the avenue most people take to get into history professionally. Do not under any circumstances get a history PhD — there is no job market for PhDs — but with a masters you can do many history and history-adjacent jobs.

Trevor_Culley

There's definitely hope. You're still 2 or 3 degrees away from being a historian in the professional sense. That gives you a lot of time to shape up into a more serious academic. You'll at least need to go to college and get a BA. Your GPA isn't great, but if you can present a good application, there's still plenty of schools that might take you. You can always do a year or two at a community college to get your scores up and save some money. While you do that, I suggest taking some courses in all the disciplines around your interests. Take some pre-law. If you always wanted to be a lawyer, you should find out how much you actually want to drop that. Take history, obviously, but explorer some different regions and time periods. Also look at classes in anthropology, archaeology, political science, or religious studies. Taking the same 6 subjects every year for most of your life probably hasn't given you a full picture of how many academic disciplines there really are and all of those intersect directly with history.

There's also some other stuff to consider. Like, what you actually want to do as a career. Most historians don't just read, write, and get paid. They hold university teaching duties, museum and library administrative positions, or public/corporate archival jobs. You should have some interest in the kind of job you'd have to have in relation to history. And let's just be clear now, the job market will be tougher, and the pay will be worse than if you chose to be a lawyer.

In addition to your undergraduate degree, you'll probably also need to go to graduate school. That's 5ish years away from you yet, so don't stress about it too much now, but you really will need to get your GPA up during college because what school your graduate degrees come from matters more. Not necessarily for prestige, but because grad programs tend to be more specific and you should go to a school that fits your specialties whatever those turn out to be. In grad school you'll need at least an MA, but a PhD for most university positions (and some at museums). That could be as much as an additional decade in school to consider.

The final thing to ask is, "Do you have any actual interest in law, or is it just a good career path?" If you actually like law, you can merge that with an interest in history. Historic preservation and archaeology are much more litigious businesses than you might expect and there are opportunities to be had working as a lawyer with historic organizations. You won't be as well paid as some of your peers, but it would be a way to fuse your interests. You could do both pre-law and history in college and see where it takes you. That's actually a pretty common program.

jackuno1917

Also I have a knack for us presidential history so I’m not sure how far I could go with that