At-A-Glance
- Develop Your Fact Finding Skills: There’s a lot going on in the world, and you have to know how to find out what you need to know to survive and thrive in it. History classes teach you how to find and analyze information, and separate fact from fiction.
- Expand Your Knowledge through Critical Thinking: Studying history means you are evaluating facts to form a conclusion. That’s critical thinking, and it’s vital in any job, and in your life.
- Become an Efficient Communicator: Historians share their knowledge orally, in writing, and visually. Majoring in history enhances all of these skills.
- Open Doors to Diverse Career Paths: Teaching and entering the law field are traditional career possibilities, but history courses equip you with tools you need to function in any and all areas of business, the media, and countless other fields.
Establish a Foundation for Academic and Professional Success
If you hope someday to hold an important job, you will need to function in a much larger world than you are in—and that world is constantly changing. History will provide you with the broader education you will need to:
- Interact with other educated people at a higher level.
- Understand how things change and how they stay the same.
- Know about important people, ordinary people, and all types of events in the past.
- Acknowledge how history shapes all our lives–from personal histories to larger forces around us.
- Analyze past decisions and their results to make better decisions in the present day.
These basic skills are crucial for advancement beyond the entry level in any career. They might not seem necessary to work on the assembly line at Chrysler Motor Company, Sony America, or Hewlett-Packard, but the onetime heads of these three corporations (Lee Iacocca, Howard Stringer, and Carly Fiorina) were history majors—and if you want to do well on the assembly line or move up from that job, the skills you learn from history won’t do you any harm.
Set The Course for Your Desired Career Path
In recent years, graduates from our program have become business executives, lawyers, government officials, museum curators, librarians, elementary and secondary school teachers, consultants, and civil servants, while many others have gone on to Ph.D. programs at UNLV, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and other major schools.
Traditional Career Paths
- Teaching: Become a teacher at different levels, from elementary school to college.
- Law: Each year, America's law schools admit thousands of history majors who, upon graduation, use their skills to research public and private archives, analyze past judicial decisions, collect oral histories for depositions, and cull through evidence to buttress arguments for use in court. These skills allow graduates to:
- Work for law firms or own their own practices
- Serve in government agencies, corporations, and other organizations
- Gain an entrée into public service
- Policy: How does a utility—power, gas, water—know what to build and where to build it, or what to plan? They look at history, and nobody does that better than historians. That’s why they hire historians to help set policy or with corporate communications.
- Publishing: The training you get in writing and analysis prepares you for jobs in editing and copyediting as well as in evaluating manuscripts and devising marketing strategies.
Non-Traditional Career Paths
- Entertainment: History affects everyone because it's everywhere in American culture. Just think about all the films and TV shows that are based on history, including biography. History is everywhere in our entertainment. You might be interested to know that Steve Carell, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Conan O’Brien are history majors. When you study history, you study the human condition. Where do you think humor comes from?
- Finance: History majors have become financial planners, bankers, and insurance executives because they bring their perspective to understanding what markets and investments do and why they do them.
- Journalism: Besides having to report and write well, anyone who covers the news—for the internet, TV, publications, podcasting, and other media—must research historical records and use oral history techniques to interview sources for stories.
“My time as an undergrad at UNLV truly shaped me not only into a better historian but also into a better individual. From the supportive and kind faculty to the plethora of opportunities to explore my passions, my experience in the department was nothing short of amazing!”Kahleia Corpuz, Class of 2024