Help! Career/life/study planning!

[FlamingoBingo]

A quick story of my life so far:

Got good GCSE's and A-Levels. Was told my entire life I'd make a good nurse so kind of ended up feeding into that profession. Did a degree in nursing. Heart wasn't really in it, although I didn't know it at the time - also was still working from a 'schooled' perspective (ie. mean old lecturers making us do work) - and ended up with a BSc (Hons) 2:2. Respectable but I know I am capable of a first.

Stopped nursing 7m after I qualified as I was pg with DD1 and haven't done any since, and now can't do any unless I re-do the whole course. I don't want to nurse anyway.

When I was doing my A-Levels (including physics to give me a science) I was desperate to have done history but it clashed with physics. I was also doing French and German. Can you see where my heart really lay? I have loved history my whole life. It's my passion and I wish I'd realised it at school and not had it buried under the 'I want to be a nurse' thing.

(I am so determined not to influence what my children want to do because of this).

After I had DD1 I started training to be a BFC and got my diploma 3 years later. You don't get a grade for diplomas but I got As and B+s for all my essays as I actually enjoyed writing them and was really passionate about the subject. That's what tells me I could get a way better degree than a 2:2.

I have decided that I will do another degree, this time in something I am really, deeply interested in. I'm home educating so, as with my diploma, I'll have to fit it in around the children, so it'll be an OU degree. I'd really love to do history, but I'm concerned that I do something that I may actually be able to use to earn money with at some point in the distant future.

Can anyone chat about this with me and help me decide? I'm so excited about doing this - I am hoping to save the money for the first course to start this September. I can't get funding because I already have a degree, useless though it is . I can't tell you how I regret doing it now .

Anyway - desperate to start buying books etc. and getting a head start

But I need to have a bit of a career/life plan before I decide on what course to do.

What can I do with history? Will it be helpful in a career? Any other thoughts?

Err, don't know if it'll be useful in a career, if you're looking for something that will be useful it might be a better idea to look at careers you might be interested in first and then work backwards to what degree would be useful.

If you're just looking for something that will be interesting and fulfilling then go for history!

I'd like a career in history but how practical or feasible that is, I do not know!

Working for a stately home, or National Trust or something...?

you could always join me in the crazy world of teaching....

seriously i think trills is right. if you want to do a course that wil gve you a career figure out what you want to do first and then find out what course you need to do it.

you can do volunteer work for the NT to see if it is something you want to do. They have a lot of volutnerring projects. I have some details somewhere as joined to get free entry to the fab park around here.

It sounds to me like a degree in history would be the most fulfilling for you. Question is, what job do you go for afterwards? A bit of googling turned up the following:

Civil Service
Intelligence
Security Service/MI5
Law (apparently significant numbers of history graduates go on to study law)
Library and Information work
Archivist
Publishing
Teacher
Museum/gallery curator
Journalist
Education administrator
Careers information officer

Any of that sound interesting?

This website looks quite good.

Academic career sounds good. Part of my BFC work is facilitating classes and doing group work, training peer supporters. I'm good at that sort of thing, and I love it.

Does that mean doing a masters/PhD and then applying for a job at a uni?

Not too sure about actually being a teacher, although it does appeal to a part of me...

Musuem curator sounds really, really interesting. Research appeals to me.

It does look like there are options.

Does anyone on MN do a job related to history, I wonder? Will probably need a new post with a different title!

Teacher teacher teacher!

Only just picked that message up, allgonebellyup! Do you mean secondary school teaching?

Actually, you know what's wrong with teaching, is that at the moment HE means we can go on holiday when it's cheap. It would kind of scupper that if I became a teacher!

A warning about the museum curator and archivist possibilities. There aren't too many jobs in these areas, so once you have done an MA in the relevant discipline you often have to do voluntary work for a while to get experience so that you can eventually get paid for doing the work!