Anthropology Majors Prepare for Life after College

Abstract

Unlike business, health, or engineering courses, undergraduate liberal arts programs do not point majors directly to a professional application, so students often need to creatively explore and identify professional roles and workplaces in which to use their education. Anthropology presents particular challenges: while students may enroll in economics if their institution has no undergraduate business program, or biochemistry may function as premed, there is no clear sense of what comes after an anthropology degree. In 2018, the American Anthropological Association announced a new approach to understanding this issue through its Undergraduate Research Fellowship. Currently enrolled anthropology majors worked together with faculty mentors, collaboratively across universities, to do anthropological research on the question, “how do anthropology majors approach the question of what comes after college?” The research provided practical insights and recommendations to departments, faculty members, career counseling centers, and the students themselves. This special section comprises six papers: an introduction to the project and the field sites; four analytic papers in which student researchers and faculty mentors explore the topics, “how students come to major in anthropology,” “how students are changed by studying anthropology,” “what anthropology majors think about their professional future,” and “what resources are available to support students’ college-to-career transition”; and a reflective essay that considers the fellowship not as a research program but as a high-impact pedagogical intervention. We show that, by participating in ethnographic research, student researchers become full members of the anthropology community who can give valuable recommendations for the future of the discipline.