Humanities Careers & Outcomes
MSUM Humanities graduates pursue careers wide and far. With a Humanities degree, you can explore career opportunities in curating, archival research, seminary, law, technical writing, editing, publishing, marketing, advertising, public relations, politics, management, and other disciplines in which professional critical thinking and communication skills are required – and that’s just about everywhere!
What can I do with a Humanities degree?
- Archivist
- Biographer
- Community service agency specialist or director
- Crisis center employee
- Curator
- Demographer
- Digital interactions producer for exhibitions
- Freelance writer
- Film festival coordinator
- Genealogist
- Government official
- Historical preservationist
- Human resources manager
- Human rights advocate
- Human services specialist
- Fundraiser and grant writer
- Librarian & library media specialist
- Lobbyist
- Marketer
- Program manager
- Publisher
- Lawyer
- Speechwriter
- Technical editor
- Technical writer
Related Links
- Humanities North Dakota
- Minnesota Humanities Center
- Advisory Council on Historic Preservation
- American Society of Journalists and Authors
- News Media Alliance
- American Association for State and Local History
- American Alliance of Museums
- American Historical Association
- American Society of Appraisers
- Art Dealers Association of America
- Association of Art History
- International Council of Museums
- Organization of American Historians
- American Historical Review
- Society of American Archivists
- National Trust for Historic Preservation
- Visual Resources Association: Intl Assoc of Image Media Professionals
- Writer’s Guild of America West
- National Women’s Studies Association
- American Anthropological Association
- Society for Applied Anthropology
- Midwest Popular Culture Association
- Fargo Film Festival
- The Human Family
Humanities Degree Student Learning Outcomes
- Diversity and Equity Skills: Students should be able to articulate patterns of oppression in cultural capital (e.g., unequal power dynamics in the creation, content selection, distribution, and reception of cultural resources); articulate common challenges to cultural participation by individuals and groups who experience oppression; articulate patterns of resistive and emancipatory cultural creativity by individuals and groups experiencing historic and ongoing exclusion.
- Reading Comprehension and Cognitive Skills: Students should be able to identify the main point or thesis of writing produced in a humanities discipline; analyze how authors develop their theses and support them with evidence; and recognize and evaluate the differences in interpretation among different authors.
- Critical Thinking Skills: Students should be able to recognize potential sources of bias in evidence-based communication; understand and interpret events in their appropriate historic and cultural context; understand and interpret relations of cause and effect and other sequential relations; understand the complexity of human motivations, and appreciate cultural differences in patterns of behavior and ideation; and synthesize a variety of evidence into a coherent and plausible account of events.
- Global Outlook: Students should recognize important cultural innovations and patterns of Europe and the United States as differing from cultural innovations and patterns of other regions. Students should be able to recognize and identify their own ethnocentricities and should be able to articulate positive and negative aspects of several distinct cultures in an objective manner.
- Research Skills: Students should be able to recognize the difference between primary and secondary sources, and understand the uses and importance of each type; select and refine an original thesis; identify a variety of different kinds of source materials that relevant to a particular topic; use the library and various bibliographic aids to identify and locate different sources relevant to a particular topic; evaluate sources for credibility; and provide citations as appropriate.
- Written Communication Skills: Students should be able to write clear and grammatical prose; formulate a thesis on the basis of insights gained from research; develop their thesis in an organized and logical progression; use appropriate evidence to support points; cite their sources properly; summarize points made in source materials and make the connections between different points of view and their own; recognize the shortcomings of their evidence and anticipate possible objections; respond constructively to criticism and make appropriate revisions.
Humanities College to Career Map