I am a rising senior at the University of Pennsylvania majoring in Near East Languages and Civilizations. I’m focusing on ancient Egypt as I have loved it and been fascinated by it as long as I can remember. I was planning to go onto grad school to get my doctorate and become an Egyptologist, and if that didn’t work out I’d figure something out. But after talking to a couple of friends, I realized I’ve made a terrible mistake. If I keep going i’ll end with a useless degree and 0 job prospects, forcing me to accept some unfulfilling horrible low wage job. My friends say my only reasonable chance of having a job with a living wage is if I start over as a sophomore and major in something useful. I know it’s the smart thing to do, but I still love Egypt, and unlike other passions like art or writing, you can’t really do Egyptological research as a hobby. Plus, I can’t afford to start over without taking out loans, which I’ve managed to avoid so far. Is there some decent job I can do with any bachelor’s degree regardless of major or do I have to start over to have any chance of making a living wage? Also, I’d appreciate it if anyone had any suggestions of how I can purge Egypt from my system so I won’t mind having no way to fulfill that passion?
I’ve heard that insurance companies take all majors.
If you go with a company like AAA, they do travel counseling to Egypt.
Say hello to graduate school. Go for your PhD and you will be golden.
Is a PhD is going to help your job prospects? You need to weigh the cost of grad school and the cost of lost earnings during grad school. Do Egyptology grad students get full funding the way STEM grad students do? How safe is Egypt to even visit nowadays? How much demand is there for Egyptology PhDs? Don’t underestimate the difficulty of getting a tenured professor job. Colleges are increasingly relying on poorly paid adjuncts.
I don’t see why not. My spouse is a Classical history buff. We do a lot of travel & collecting related to this research hobby.
I suggest you take the Foreign Service Officer Test for a US State Dept job:
https://careers.state.gov/work/foreign-service/officer/test-process
Info about the test
http://www.pearsonvue.com/fsot/
Actually, there are a huge number of jobs that simply look for a college degree. It can be in ANYTHING. I have just now searched ‘college degree entry level’ on the jobs website Indeed.com; I got 13,224 results. The first five results are for account manager, sales, financial representative, entry-level management, and management/sales trainee. In every one of these it is required or preferred that the candidate have a bachelor’s degree, but in none of these is a major stated.
A lot of people have majored in things like Near East Languages and Civilizations. What have they done afterward? People with cultures/civilization degrees (who may or may not have done graduate work) completing the survey at Students Review dot com have become research assistants, a translator, a (Princeton Review) tutor, a childcare counselor, a teacher assistant, a loan administrator/programmer, a managing partner, an administrative assistant, an attorney and a custodian. So, extremely diverse in field of work and (as the salary graph shows) in pay. People with that type of major completing the survey at http://www.payscale.com/index/US/Degree/B have mostly gone into business occupations.
This information says, as I see it, is with this type of major you have to work fairly hard at being well employed, but if you do, you’ll be all right (though not a professional Egyptologist).
Strengths you are likely to have in your major and can capitalize on are fluency in Arabic and expertness in knowing how to learn. Also, people from all fields go into computer work (http://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/stem/stem-html/, put your cursor on ‘Computer workers’).
Changing your major seems unnecessarily drastic, but I feel you would do well to take business and computer courses as electives or whatever and solidify your ability to speak, understand, read and write Arabic. Also, try to do internships while you are still a student in any field you like that is expected to have a good ratio of openings to qualified candidates (http://www.bls.gov/emp/ep_table_102.htm).
Any worthwhile PhD program, even in a field like Egyptology, will be funded. So there’s that. (Masters programs, not so much, though.) But like @GMTplus7 notes, the academic job market is horrible, and Egyptology (and related disciplines) has been in bad shape for longer than most—so that might not be the best route to take.
But that said, why have so many people bought into the idea that the point of a degree named X is intended to result in placement into a job named X? Yes, this is the case in many of the applied fields (engineering, speech pathology, finance,…), but it certainly isn’t the case for most degree fields.
A college degree is designed to prove that you know how to learn, and that you know how to extend knowledge in new directions. This is why so many jobs require college degrees. Yes, you won’t get a job as an engineer with a degree in Egyptology (since engineering as a field has opted for requiring a specific applied degree rather than a generalist degree—a position that is the subject of some handwringing among engineers right now, by the way), but there are plenty of other jobs out there.
And, in fact, an Egyptology degree can put you in a very strong place for some career paths. I mean, given the depths to which the United States has embedded itself in Middle Eastern politics and such, someone with a knowledge of the history behind a very important player in the Middle East would have to be attractive to some pieces of the government, nongovernmental organizations, and private companies alike, you know?
“A college degree is designed to prove that you know how to learn, and that you know how to extend knowledge in new directions.”
@dfbdfb No, a college degree is not designed to prove you know how to learn. Having a BA or BS suggests that you have had access to the opportunity to learn and that you showed mastery of course content at a level that was deemed to be at least acceptable to those at whatever college you obtained a degree from.
A degree in Egyptology is not the same as having a degree in middle eastern studies, something that may be viewed as more valuable today than in generations past. But that is not true about Egyptology. I can’t imagine there being much funding available for a PhD in Egyptology. The academic job market is not horrible across the board but area is important. In some areas the job market is better now than it has been but in other areas it is not.
Research what you read. Not everything on these threads is accurate. “The devil is in the details”, so to speak!
Given how far along you are in your major, I’d consider graduate school in am area that is most likely to yield you a job. Do your research and find one that will value your undergraduate major but that has good job prospects.
As a sidebar, @lostaccount, in what material way is “access to the opportunity to learn and [showing] mastery of course content at a level that was deemed to be at least acceptable” not effectively equivalent to “proving that you know how to learn”? Different description, same effect, it seems to me.
And I stand by my statement that PhD studies in Egyptology would be funded. This is simply because the norm is that all PhD studies are funded. Being offered admission to a program without funding is being told that they didn’t want to outright reject you, but that they don’t actually want you to join the program—think of it as the equivalent of the undergrad-admissions waitlist, but even more heartless. (And yes, the academic job market in Egyptology is moribund. Modern Middle Eastern Studies less so, though not as strong as you might expect, given current demand for those programs.)
There’s more accurate on this thread than not to this point, really.
I’ll think about this. @GMTplus7, I’m fascinated by ancient Egypt but I do not want to live in Egypt. Also, @jjwinkle, I don’t know Arabic and despise business desk jobs with a blooming passion, any other suggestions? And any advice about how I can stop myself from being passionate about Egypt so I won’t mind never being able to satisfy my passion?
Life without mistakes doesn’t happen. At least you realized this one now, while you are still a student and can get student-based internships and take a few job-useful courses.
@dfbdfb I doubt it, hardly any government agency or big NGO gives a single flying f*** about ancient Egypt, only Sadat on wards. The only exception I can think of is ICE for stolen antiquities, but they usually just consult professional Egyptologists.
You don’t think NGOs and governments care about history? You really ought to look into the kind of information they use sometime before being quite so dismissive.
Look, if you’ve decide you don’t want to major in something, that’s your right—but it’s not your right to determine that something is “useless” when it isn’t.
@dfbdfb I didn’t say they don’t care about history, they just don’t care about ancient history. They want to know how the situation in the past has affected the current people of the region, and you can’t get those kinds of answers from an historical period that ended 2000 years ago. Also, I’m not the one who first said it was useless, my friends did.
When school resumes, go to the career center early in the year and often. There’s no reason to start over as there are numerous ways for you to be gainfully employed with a degree from Penn. Do you have an internship for the summer? If not, that should be your immediate concern.
I’m also curious what the OP is doing this summer and how this summer’s activities could help lead to a job after graduation. Also, I wouldn’t rush into a PhD program because you think your undergrad degree is unemployable. I would think first about the employability of future graduate studies. A lot of schools have one expert in Egypt and a new professor candidate would have to wait for that person to die or retire before a particular university hires another.
What @CheddarcheeseMN said—in a lot of fields, a PhD is less employable than a masters or bachelors.
If your friends have said your degree is useless, have you asked the people at your university’s career center what they think about its utility? Because they’re the ones with actual, you know, expertise on that.
What type of internships did you get this summer?
You could find a job with your degree if you can explain 1° your skill set 2° relevant coursework and 3° use the Penn name and network.
But it sounds like you’re thinking about this only now and thus haven’t really prepared for life after Penn, meaning you have a lot of catching up to do. But as was explained above, the way it works for most fields isn’t a linear “study egyptology, become an egyptologist”. That’s how it works for majors that are purposely vocational, such as teaching, nursing, engineering, and those that act as substitute such as economics and, increasingly, CS and math.
(Remember that TV show about 15 years ago where the premise was that studying math was as esoteric as studying philosophy, and that show was somehow trying to prove math was useful and relevant because it really wasn’t obvious to most? Yeah. Not today’s mindset at all.)
For other majors, you need help in determining your skill set, what classes to take to improve your professional outlook either through sharpening these skills or filling a missing skill.
What classes have you taken, beside Ancient History?
(Archeology, Anthropology, Forensic Science, Art History, French)?
What about gen eds - what did you take for foreign language, science, math?
Did you take an Economics class? A geopolitics class?
Any way you can tie your knowledge of Ancient Egypt to today’s Maghreb?
Have you studied in Egypt/abroad?
Been part of a dig?
Can you read Ancient languages?
I wouldn’t go into a PHD in Egyptology - there’s no linerar path for you, it’d essentially be dealying your choices and thinking, effecively setting you back; positions are pretty much dying off. Unless you’ve won some kind of national prize that establishes you’re currently THE top student in the subject, in which case there might be a future for you at that one position that might open in the next 15 years. But since so few universities offer that field, your odds of making the next 6 years worthy of your time if you spend them in a PHD, and ending up with a tenure-track position, are close to zero. (And since the field is so rare, I doubt there’d be random adjunct positions, except for one course here and there - teaching one course won’t even pay minimum wage, the going rate is per semester and comes down to well under $1,000 a month, making adjuncts eligible for food stamps despite their work.)
I would also consider not graduating next year, as you obviously haven’t really thought of the way you’ll use your degree and therefore haven’t taken “professionally relevant” coursework such as digital literacy or statistics (may have different names at Penn).
Do you have a 4-year plan? What does next year look like?
Can you turn that “last year in the 4 year plan” into a 2-year plan where you add relevant coursework?
It also sounds like you’re not well-acquainted with Penn’s excellent career center - if you have a couple days off from your internship or job, go there and ask for help. Plan to do a second junior year: Doing a second junior year with more focus will save you thousands of dollars down the road, ie., will allow you to find a job rather than flop around from barista job to temp work - but if you’re on financial aid, you may have a problem. I know the majority of students don’t graduate in 4 years, but at Penn they do; financial aid may not follow. In which case you’d have to pack as much as possible between now (summer session 2 at a local community college or state college to start you off with “relevant” coursework) and next year’s summer session. Federal aid is good for 6 years but it wouldn’t cover Penn’s costs; however since it sounds like you have zero debt, it means you could try to use up the loans you haven’t taken yet, which would total $19,000 so far.
Tell Financial Aid you haven’t taken the classes you were supposed to and will need to graduate in 2018, not 2017, how does that work?
It seems a glaring omission you don’t speak Arabic when you’re focusing on an area of the world where it’s the main language today, but if you graduate in 2 years that gives you 4 semesters + opportunity for some time abroad to remedy this deficiency. Regardless of what you’re doing this summer, start there. Look for courses in Arabic.
In the end, there are lots of possibilities for you.
Some clear paths related to your major:
- art appraisal. Would require your taking some art history classes and probably a specialized one-year master’s.
- stolen antiquities: search/recovery.
- insurance companies that work for museums
- forensic anthropology
Some are not focused on Egyptology but use your critical thinking and general skills:
- law school
- TFA (=> if you have sufficient knowledge of History and Art History to teach…)
- adding business/math classes => working at a company => getting an MBA
- if you can reach an intermediate level in Arabic by graduation time, work for the government
- look into graduate-level critical language flagships for Arabic and apply
Some are simply: you’re an Ivy League graduate. It’s always better to attend a top school when you’re choosing an esoteric field or one that doesn’t have immediate careers attaches to it. Their brand will have pull if you bother using their services. Use UPenn’s incredible career center and alumni network. Follow their pointers.
SUMMARY OF IMMEDIATE ACTIONS
- Find your local state college or community college. See if they offer Arabic 1 and another “relevant” class for Summer Session B.
- Start working on your Arabic.
- Go to UPenn’s Career Center.
- Contact Financial Services and see how you can organize the next two years financially speaking.
Get yourself to the career center and start working with them ASAP.
I am quite astounded by this thread. First, @PeterEmrys , relax – you are getting a degree from one of the top universities in the world – you are not only fine you are way better than fine. You are accomplishing a great thing, and studying something you have passion for.
Most young people your age don’t know what they want to do. And most careers don’t have pre-professional undergrad degrees; so you have DONE NOTHING WRONG OR BAD. In fact, you are like most of your peers.
Get your degree, figure out what you want to do, and then pursue it. Grad school, law school, MBAs will be there when you decide.
Stop looking for people to tell you something like “I have one word for you - plastics”. That was a joke when The Graduate came out and it is a joke now.
Get some entry level jobs, maybe travel, explore options as you can afford to. Just relax. If you were smart enough to get into UPenn you are likely to figure it out. These things usually work themselves out also. Your future is bright!
Thanks everyone. My friends just freaked me out, saying I had to choose between starting over as a sophomore or end up in minimum wage job, no third option. @MYOS1634 No internships (I would despise working in a corporate setting sitting behind a desk and fetching coffee) and no job. Unfortunately I live in a really really small town and my mom uses our only car to commute, so my options are very limited. Taken archaeology, anthro, a curatorial seminar (helped plan an exhibition at the Museum), one semester of calculus, 2 semesters of chemistry which I bombed, a few literature classes, 2 semesters of classical Greek, and by the time I graduate I’ll have had 4 semesters of Middle Egyptian. No economics, comp sci, or engineering courses I know other subjects like comparative government, geography, and statistics but I did those in high school AP classes so from employer’s point of view I know nothing about those subjects. I’ve tried to go with my major adviser on a dig to Egypt but because of the Ministry of Antiquities’s red tape the soonest I could go is this winter break. I have been part of an archaeological dig, a colonial period house in SE Pennsylvania, did that for 6 weeks, 9-5. As for taking another year, I’m not sure I could take having to watch all my friends graduate in May while I have to go through another year completely alone, not to mention the embarrassment of having to tell everyone “I wasn’t good enough to finish in time”. And the thought of having to shackle myself to loans that will take me the rest of my life, or longer, to pay off terrifies me. My 4 year plan before this was to finish up undergrad this year then jump straight into a Ph.d program, but clearly that’s not going to happen. And with things I could do completely unrelated to Egypt, I’d be tempted to work at McDonald’s forever over going into law or business.
@MYOS1634 Also, I don’t think I can relate ancient Egypt to modern Egypt in such a way that I could make a career out of it. And about the last thing I said, do you think I should just swallow my pride and go down a career path I hate just for financial security?