Hi all,
I have recently become interested in possibly pursuing a PhD in history, and I am a little confused as to how you show you can do research in the discipline. I am not sure if that sounds like I am dissing history, but I hope it doesn’t, because that is not the case. The other disciplines I am considered pursing a PhD in are philosophy and psychology, and I just feel that conducting research in these fields is a more clear-cut, defined concept.
The short answer to your question is the way most undergrads demonstrate this is by assisting a history professor in their own research, and/or doing independent study project(s) and/or a thesis. If you’re currently in college, I’d talk to a history professor about your interest and ask them how you can get involved in research.
The long answer:
How far out are you from applying?
Generally speaking, you should not pursue a PhD in a discipline unless you are virtually absolutely sure that you want to pursue a career in research in that field. I know you might still just be exploring, and that’s totally fine! But the PhD isn’t necessary for the vast majority of careers out there, and the academic job market in history (and philosophy) are both abysmal. (It’s also not great for psychology, either, but there are more non-academic things you can do with a PhD in psychology - especially if it’s clinical).
First of all, what’s your undergraduate major? If you didn’t major in history, you’ll find it a hard sell to get into a good history PhD program. You’d likely need to get an MA in history first to be competitive, or at least take a lot of undergrad history courses. (Ditto on philosophy and psychology.) Note that many history programs require reading proficiency in 1-2 languages, and since you have to demonstrate that by the end of your second or third year in the program most PhD programs in history like for you to come in with proficiency in one already and ideally having begun the second.
@julliet thank you for always giving thorough responses. History seems like it may be the hardest for me, as I do not like taking languages. Only actually confirmed recently that many programs required language proficiency (though I obviously should have known). As far as classes and grades go:
Psych classes- F15: Social Psych (A) S16: Personality Psych (A) F16: Cognitive
History classes-S16: Women’s Mid-20th Century (A-) F16: Intro to Modern World
Philosophy classes-F16: Bioethics
I am a sophomore ; obviously, it seems like History could be an uphill battle, and Psych looks the most promising right now. I have a prominent Cog Psych professor who is well known in the field, and my Bioethics professor is a leader in the sub-field. Hopefully I can get involved in doing some research with one of them.
Have you declared your major yet? If you want to get a PhD in psychology, then you’d major in psychology; if you want a PhD in philosophy you’d major in philosophy. Psychology is my field and you are missing some basic courses: Intro (how did you take social, personality, and cognitive psych without intro?), research methods, statistics being three of them. Philosophy I don’t know as well, but you only have one course so I’m betting there are basics you are missing.
But before you even get to that point, the real question is: what do you want to do? A graduate degree is a means to an end: you get one because it helps you towards a certain career. Why do you want a PhD in psychology or philosophy or maybe history? Do you want to be a professor?
Getting involved in research with one of those professors is a good step towards a PhD program, but before you do that you should think about which discipline you’d like to pursue. Psychology and philosophy are very different fields with completely different approaches towards research.
@juillet I am a psych major as of now; I took AP in high school. I also forgot to mention that I did take statistics and got an A in that also. That is a good point, I did not realize that Psych and Philosophy were so different as far as research goes. I definitely do want to be a professor, I am just not sure in what field. I also would most likely want to pursue clinical psychology, and I have heard that Clinical is the most competitive PhD in terms of admissions. Plus, not getting an internship during the program obviously creates problems, and I have heard many students are not getting internships currently.
Getting a PhD - and, at most schools, being a professor - is about having a near-obsessive love about a specific topic. You have to love that area, and sub-area, so much that you are willing to study a pretty narrow portion of it for a very long time - what could end up being 12-20 years at least (6-8 years of training in your PhD plus another 6-10 years as a postdoc plus the pre-tenure years as an assistant professor), and at most the entirety of your career. Normally I would say that jobs are not about finding your passion, but academia is one of the exceptions, much like becoming a musician or an actor or an artist: you gotta be really passionate about something, because much like artistic careers you will spend many years toiling long hours at low pay for the small chance of making it.
For that reason, few successful graduate students and professors had a sort of abstract desire to be a professor of “something”, nothing in particular. Instead, students usually go to a PhD program because they are really interested in how our brain processes memories, or the philosophy of science, or the history of African American sharecroppers in the early 20th century, or something else pretty specific - and because they love the enterprise of the field so much that they want to teach it to others. I’m not saying that you can’t get there, but what I am saying is that your focus right now shouldn’t be “I want to be a professor someday.” It should be discovering what your interests and passions are (subject-wise). First you have to figure out if you even like anything enough to consider being a professor of it. The answer might be no, and that’s fine too!
The other thing you may not realize is that getting into graduate school and to academia as a career is much more about research passion than teaching passion. If you want to be a professor because you have a dream of teaching philosophy or psychology to college students…that’s not really what academia is all about. It’s a complex issue to explain and I can give you more detail if you PM me, but even if you end up at a small teaching college for your career, you’ll still have likely spent the first 6-10 years of it pursuing primarily research - and even at that small teaching college, you might still be expected to make research 40-60% of your job.
The other thing that you should know is that the academic market in most fields is absolutely terrible. It’s really bad in history and pretty bad in philosophy. It’s not great in psychology. I urge you to lurk around the forums for the Chronicle of Higher Education, especially the Job-Seeking Experiences and Interview Process ones, and to visit the Academic Job Search wikis in history and philosophy (the psych one is not as active; it basically just serves as a job listing). You can also read articles about the academic job market in Inside Higher Ed, the CHE and all across the net.
The job market is bad; lots of humanities scholars end up spending years after the end of their PhD working as an adjunct (paid an average of $3,000 per class with no benefits and no office). Few of them ever get tenure-track jobs. In the social sciences, lots of scholars may end up either as adjuncts or as postdocs for years on end.
I’m not trying to be a downer, nor am I saying you shouldn’t get a PhD at all (I have one!). More like my advice to students now is only get a PhD if you have a really strong drive/passion to study something you love for 6-8 years, with the knowledge that you very likely will NOT be a professor at the end of it, and you’re okay with that.
Oh, and two other things:
-Yes, psychology and philosophy research are very different. Psychology is all behavioral research, so you’d be doing experiments, observational, or survey-based research (or some combination thereof) with humans or animal models in laboratories or community/field settings. For example, my PhD work involved giving people with HIV surveys over the course of several weeks and then analyzing that data using statistics to look at how trends changed over time. I have friends who did things like gave rats cocaine to see what would happen,* or ran people through cognitive tasks in the lab, etc.
Philosophy research is much less behavioral and more about lots of deep reading and writing. I am much less familiar with this, but I have never known a philosopher to do an experiment or a survey. I think there’s lots of archival work and many of them also have reading knowledge of Latin and Greek, and/or maybe German or French or Sanskrit depending on the kind of philosophy they did.
-Yes, clinical psychology is the most competitive, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go for it. If you want to be a clinician and/or you want to do research on clinical work and practice, then that’s the way to go. Two alternatives, though, are counseling psychology (very similar to clinical, but less competitive) and school psychology (the provision of mental health services in schools and other educational settings). Another related alternative is doing an MSW and then a PhD in social work (70% of clinical mental health providers are actually social workers, and with an MSW or a PhD you can be licensed to practice social work. The academic job market in social work is also a lot better than it is in psychology much less the humanities, so there’s that).
-Actually, a third thing I just thought of. If you want to be a professor in general, there are certain fields that actually have a shortage of professors. Business is one of them. If you are interested in psychology, but can direct your interests towards behavioral economics or industrial/organizational psychology or management - things that business schools would be interested in - you have a much better chance of being a professor than if you studied something like social or developmental or clinical psychology.
Economics also has better prospects than most fields, especially if you go to a top program, so if you are at all curious about how and why people buy things behavioral economics might be a good intersection to investigate.
And nursing has excellent prospects. There are lots of programs for people who didn’t major in nursing in undergrad to get their BSN -> MSN -> PhD smoothly, and nurses do a lot of research that overlaps with psychology and mental health, particularly if they are mental health or psychiatric nurses. You’d also have the flexibility of clinical practice/health care provision. Even the big name universities like Penn and Emory are practically begging for nursing faculty.