Careers
Find yourself. Or at least find a job.
Social Science Careers
You’re interested in the way things work. Why, just last week you got yelled at for taking your dad’s iMac apart in order to get a gander at its inner mechanisms. Okay, so it was also partly revenge for him missing your baseball game the week before, but we don’t want to get into the middle of any family squabbles.
The point is that you’re not just interested in the what, where and who. You’ve got a hankering to know the how and why. But you were never one for cutting open frogs on a miniature operating table. You love the idea of science, but you don’t want to be your typical lab coat-and-goggle-wearing scientist.
Fortunately for you, it turns out there’s a whole area of science referred to as “social science” that’s concerned with the way things work…just not necessarily in the “understanding chemical bonds” sort of way.
Anthropologists and archaeologists want to know how we as a species came to be the type of complex beings we are today, sociologists are interested in how societies form and function, and psychologists want to get inside people’s brains and discover what makes them tick (without having to cut into any of the actual tissue).
So if you have an inquisitive nature, and often find yourself asking some of the bigger questions there are in this world, then you may want to consider a career in the social sciences.
On the whole, it doesn’t pay as well as the science-sciences, but there are certainly exceptions. Economists, for example, pull in around $90k on average. Huh…the guys and gals who spend their lives studying the ins and outs of economics actually make a nice chunk of change. Go figure.
Psychologists and sociologists also do all right; think in the $65k-75k range, while archaeologists and historians make closer to $50k on average.
The annual pay in these fields tends not to dip much below that $50k mark because, as with chemists and astrophysicists, it does require that you spend a few years in school (and therefore a few years of accumulating student loan debt) to become qualified, so it’s well understood that you’ll need to be adequately compensated for your time and oversized brain.
No bus driver salary for you, even if you are just brushing dust off a bunch of very old bones.