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10 Struggles History Majors Know All Too Well

This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Geneseo chapter.

Ah, the history major.  Old people who have no idea about the nature of today’s job market will inevitably insist that your degree is useless and STEM majors will claim it’s easy.  You’ll read more than any human ever should, and you’ll still hardly scratch the surface of humankind’s entire narrative.  Late nights will be spent agonizing over essays and you will regret nothing.  Join us for a walk through of the history major’s biggest struggles.

 

1. Constantly finding scraps of paper with Library of Congress call numbers for books written on them all over your room

 

 

2. Needing the world’s largest bag to carry all of your research books

 

 

3. The resulting backache from the aforementioned bag of books

 

 

4. Writing six essays in a day

 

 

5. Getting lost in the library because you don’t actually know how to navigate Library of Congress

 

 

6. Developing the ability to speed read over 200 pages of text in an hour

 

 

7. Having the unique pleasure of getting your arguments ripped apart by someone who is an expert in their field

 

 

8. Hand-cramps from in-class essays and writing assignments

 

 

9. Being notorious at the library for taking out 15 books at a time

 

 

10. Stalking twitterstorians and loving history memes

 

 

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Carolyn is a student of History and French with a passion for social justice, learning, art, and music. She's a member of the Voices for Planned Parenthood, the Phi Alpha Theta honor society and the Phi Eta Sigma honor society. She plans on studying abroad in Dublin in the spring and backpacking around Europe all summer. Carolyn can almost always be found somewhere in Milne Library with a big cup of tea and a large stack of books.
Victoria Cooke is a Senior History and Adolescence Education major with a Women's and Gender Studies minor at SUNY Geneseo. Apart from being an editor and the founder of Her Campus at Geneseo, she is also the co-president of Voices for Planned Parenthood and a Curator for TEDxSUNYGeneseo. Her passions include feminism, reading, advocating for social justice, and crafting. In the future, she hopes to inspire the next generation of history nerds and activists.