A question that our history majors often ask is, “How can I have your job?” What they often mean is, “How can I become a professor?” and (whether they realize it or not, “What is it like being a professor?”
I’ll tell you what I tell them–it takes a combination of hard work, love of reading, researching, teaching, and writing, and luck. There are thousands of incredibly smart, exceptionally qualified people who have earned a Ph.D. in history and never get a full-time job as a professor. There is a major element of luck in who ends up with any particular job, and I think it’s important for students interested in being a professor to know that from the outset. There are unfortunately no guarantees that things will end up the way you want.
We’ll break this series up into a few parts, since it’s a long process from college to professor–at least 5 years of post-graduate education, and for most people, at least 6-8. For me, it was 6 years of graduate school at The Ohio State University.
First step: Graduate School
The first step towards becoming a college professor is to attend graduate school! You can earn an M.A. first and then apply to a Ph.D. program, or apply to a Ph.D. program directly from undergrad–in most cases, you’ll earn a Master’s degree along the way. You typically spend 2-3 years earning a Master’s degree. You’ll take classes that are more specialized and intensive than undergraduate courses, read more books and journal articles, and write a longer research paper than you have before. In college, a 10 page research paper might be standard in an upper level class. In a master’s level class, it might be 15-20 pages for each class! For students interested in going on to earn a Ph.D., they should plan on writing a master’s thesis, which is a longer paper of original research. These can range from 50-100+ pages. Often, a master’s thesis is the beginning of a Ph.D. dissertation, which is a book-length project.
After a Master’s degree, you move into the exam phase of graduate school. Like in college, you have a major field of study, and typically have several minors or concentrations. My major field was Early American history, which at my graduate school was everything prior to 1877. My minor fields were Atlantic World history (the study of how Africa, the Americas, and Europe interacted with each other during the 1500s-1800s) and Native American history. You have intense exams in each of these fields, based on a massive reading list of 50-100 books for each of your minor fields and 100-200+ books for your major field. I took a written exam and an oral exam. The written exams were answering 3 questions in 20 pages in 48 hours for the major fields, and answering 2 questions in 10 pages in 24 hours for each of the minor fields. The oral exam was 2 hours of 4 professors asking whatever questions they wanted about what you had written and the books you had read. If it sounds intimidating, it really is! The point, though, is to ensure that you have broad knowledge of each of the fields you are teaching and doing research in. And as my advisor told me before hand, we want you to get to the point where you say, “I don’t know the answer. But I would probably start trying to find it here.” No historian knows everything, and for most of us, the constant learning is a huge part of what we love about what we do! But knowing enough to have an idea of what reputable sources you can turn to for information is also a big part of being able to teach.
Once you finish those exams, you are now ABD–all requirements for the Ph.D. are finished except for that dissertation (All But Dissertation). Minor detail, right? You have to write a 200+ page book. This can take a year or two, depending on how much research you’ve already done on your chosen topic in the earlier years of graduate school, or it can take a lifetime. Many people get to ABD but never finish the Ph.D. for a variety of reasons.
We’ll talk about the dissertation phase of grad school next time!