The fact that you are even asking this question means you are likely not in an academic field, and you instead want to pursue a degree that interests you. Yet there are many people in the same boat of pursuing a history degree while working in finance, technology, or some other field with no immediate plans to change careers. As for myself, I am still in entertainment technology, having completed a bachelor’s in military history and now pursuing a master’s in ancient and classical history.
When people hear this, they often inquire whether I have plans to leave technology and become a teacher, but the reality is my higher education has helped my current career. It can likely help yours too, but you have to break it down abstractly. What does military history have to do with technology? Not a lot, but the effort to earn the degree, the skills acquired along the way, and the practice of those skills all made me better in my current career.
For example, my military history degree consisted of 121 credit hours, which translated into 41 courses and 37 research papers, covering the prehistoric period to the twenty-first-century. The topics of those papers are not what matters; it is the process of reading, researching, analyzing, writing and re-writing drafts, and producing 10-40 page papers on original research for dozens of teachers that made me hone skills that I use every day. Their feedback and demands forced me to learn how to work for different audiences. You cannot learn these skills overnight. They require practice, and a history degree is a superb way to get there.
By Scott Manning
Online Learning Tips, Student Contributor
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