PhD with tangential undergraduate studies

juillet
Thu, 21 Nov 2013 10:42:25 +0000

While you don’t technically have to major in a field in order to get a PhD in it, you DO need to have the equivalent of a major, especially in today’s competitive PhD market. Fluency in a language and “some” is not enough (depending, of course, on how much the “some” is) since language and cultural studies PhD programs often involve also studying literature, culture, and linguistic aspects of the language.

If you know right now as a high school junior that you want a PhD in German, then you should major in German. If you choose that program, you won’t have enough German under your belt to take upper-level classes taught in German at the American school. European schools also tend to be more special-focus than American schools, so in your last two years you may not be able to take any German studies/cultural classes at the business school in Germany.

Also, I’m curious as to why you want a PhD in German. I will warn you that the job market for humanities PhDs is very tight right now, and many of them are having to go outside of their field to find employment. Language and cultural studies is even worse. If your goal is to be a professor of German, chances are good that you won’t find a tenure-track job in that field (although of course this is at least 11 years from now that we’re talking, and more likely 15, so who knows what the market would look like then. But the market in the humanities has been bad since the 1970s).