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The Tired Historian
I graduated from Arizona State University in December with a master’s in history. This was a remarkable accomplishment, but this past month has been a blur of job applications, endless coffee refills, and unexplained exhaustion.
This article will shed light on the rawness of grad life, expose the troublesome job market facing public historians, and maybe even make a few people laugh.
Groundhog Day
Most recent graduates may recognize this parallel. A few weeks after graduation — if you do not have a job lined up — life begins to feel like Groundhog Day.
I spent my first week of post-grad life attending to the endless house jobs that piled up while I was consumed with essays and research. We moved to Southern California a month before my last semester, and boxes littered the house like trash. Unpacking and organizing kept me busy for a week, but I soon began to fall into a mundane state.
We may not realize it when we are in college or engaged with a job, but menial school and work tasks provide us with minor hits of dopamine when we complete them successfully. We may not enjoy school all the time, and maybe we hate our jobs, but at a chemical level, our brains love these successes.
