Career Resources
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Loyola's Career Development Center makes many useful resources available on their Website. See their page What Can I do with This Major? to view a chart of careers open to students who major in Classics and other fields. The charts are licensed from the Career Planning staff of Career Services at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, revised 2007. The page makes several important points:
The Career Exploration Center at the University of Texas at Austin's page What Can I do with a Major in...?, in its listings under Liberal Arts includes a survey of "direct", "less direct", and "indirect" career paths on which a degree in Classical Studies (or History) can set you - each with many exciting possibilities. WorldWideLearn remarks, "A Bachelor of Arts (BA) in classical studies is an excellent starting point for any of the humanities or liberal arts specialties that originated from the original classical disciplines ... a BA may be sufficient academic training for a variety of careers in the arts, government and politics, communications, and business--positions that require a broad-based education in human institutions. ... If you decide to pursue a career in the social sciences - such as anthropology, archeology, geography, history, political science, or sociology - you'll find the educational standards are among the highest of all occupations." After Skidmore: Jobs in Classics attractively outlines fields of work where training in Classics is especially relevant, and success-stories of Skidmore graduates in very many of them. The Department of Classics, University of California Santa Barbara also presents statistics and testimonials about Classicists and their careers. |
On the subject of careers, the Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford, remarks, "What employers appreciate is that Classics provides mental training in a whole range of different disciplines, and produces graduates of exceptional intellectual flexibility. In our world of rapid social and technological change, it is the capacity to react to new and unforeseen developments with flexibility which employers value most, and it is widely recognized that Classics and related subjects produce just the kind of graduate they are looking for, with an unparalleled capacity to adapt to new circumstances and learn new skills." Some things really never do go out of date!
And then there's the paragraphs from The Princeton Review that Classics departments everywhere rejoice to quote: "We can't overestimate the value of a Classics major. Check this out: according to Association of American Medical Colleges, students who major or double-major in Classics have a better success rate getting into medical school than do students who concentrate solely in biology, microbiology, and other branches of science. Crazy, huh? Furthermore, according to Harvard Magazine, Classics majors (and math majors) have the highest success rates of any majors in law school. Believe it or not: political science, economics, and pre-law majors lag fairly far behind. Even furthermore, Classics majors consistently have some of the highest scores on GREs of all undergraduates. Shocked? Don't be. One reason Classics majors are so successful is that they completely master grammar. Medical terminology, legal terminology, and all those ridiculously worthless vocabulary words on the GRE (and the SAT) have their roots in Greek and Latin. Ultimately, though, Classics majors get on well in life because they develop intellectual rigor, communications skills, analytical skills, the ability to handle complex information, and, above all, a breadth of view which few other disciplines can provide."
Periodically, news features report other benefits of Classical studies (for example, 11 March 2009, seattlepi.com); they often focus on college admissions, where instruments like the SAT make it easy to quantify Latin students' superior skills (2002 SAT mean verbal scores: Latin students 666, French students 637, German students 622, Spanish student 581, as opposed to a mean verbal score of 504 overall, noted by New Horizons for Learning), but the benefits that underpin successful schooling achieve their real value throughout careers and lives.
This page was updated 11 May 2009 by jlong1@luc.edu.
