The You-Must-Specialize Blues
about the author
Dan hails from the lovely hamlet of Pearl River, NY, and is now a sophomore at the University of Rochester, studying history. He enjoys reading, writing, playing his cello, challenging his roommates to Call of Duty tournaments, and traveling.
Oh, graduate school! I already hear your siren call, and I wish to go to you. Like Odysseus sailing past the sirens, though, I’ve noticed there are some serious rocks separating us. The biggest obstacle is your emphasis on specialization, before I even set foot in a graduate seminar.
During the last few months, I have begun researching PhD. programs in history. As part of the graduate school application process, I will have to indicate the fields I want to specialize in. For example, I could select a methodology (political, economic, social, labor), a geographic region (America, Asia, etc.), a theme (intellectual history, science and technology), or some combination of these to study in depth. The precise programs offered vary by school, but nonetheless, graduate applicants must construct an extremely specific academic niche to immerse themselves in.
I suspect that the specificity of these historical sub-disciplines, combined with the considerable length of a PhD. program (on average, five years), is intended to weed out the serious applicants from those who are not so serious. Such rigor is perfectly understandable, and there are similarly complex application processes for just about every advanced program you can imagine (medical school, law school, etc.). However, I wonder if the history community, by making applicants specialize to such a degree up front, is getting a bit carried away.
Consider the age of most applicants to graduate school. Though older individuals do go back to school to start second careers, or to improve their credentials, the average age of the incoming graduate student is somewhere in the early-to-mid-twenties. These are young people, still figuring out their place in the world and exploring their interests. In other words, it seems somewhat absurd to expect people barely out of their teens to know their precise research interests for the next half-decade.
Like most undergraduates, I’ve changed my mind about what to do with my life repeatedly since coming to college. I started out as a political science major, switched to history, and now I’m considering adding a second major in religion. In addition, I considered minors in English, pre-law, and visual studies – none of which I chose to pursue. As for career options, I’ve seriously pondered five different professions over the last two years. And here’s the kicker: There are still two-and-a-half years left before I get my B.A.
All of this questioning links back to the difficulty of graduate school applications and the selection of committed young scholars from a wider pool of applicants. Is it good to sift the best and the brightest out of the pile? Absolutely. Is it good to have a rough idea of the methodologies and regions you want to study in graduate school? Of course. Getting an M.A. or PhD. is a long haul, involving work as a teacher’s assistant, the study of hundreds of dense books, and the complex process of writing a dissertation. If you’re going to sign up for that, you better have at least one subject you’re crazy for, because you’re about to become intimately acquainted with it.
But it seems unreasonable to require such considerable specificity – to describe a narrow scholarly niche and outline a multi-year plan of semi-independent study – up front. Given how often young people adjust their plans, graduate history professors seem to be setting themselves up for future headaches, because their pupils most likely will change course midstream.
In short, I think that historians should revisit the notion of being a generalist, rather than a budding specialist, at the outset of grad school. College students often hear about the Ivory Tower syndrome – professors so immersed in tiny pockets of their field that they lose sight of the big picture and even disdain people who study the big picture.[i] Forcing graduate applicants to zoom in on the small picture so early in life is a great way to perpetuate that syndrome.
It’s fine to be a specialist eventually, but students should have time to figure that out, once they’ve begun graduate coursework. Let students come in the door as generalists (e.g., someone studying American history) rather than stressed-out specialists (e.g., someone studying the economic and social implications of the 1960s protest movement through a post-structuralist lens). It’s worth thinking about.
[i]For a thorough discussion of the specialist-vs.-generalist dilemma, and the use of “small picture” vs. “big picture” rhetoric, refer to: Roger L. Ransom, Conflict and Compromise: The Political Economy of Slavery, Emancipation, and the American Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pgs. 4-5.
