We have a new website at CU today; one of the interesting things on it is a page under the ‘admissions’ section that describes many careers and the departments whose program might fit you for such a career.

I was interested to know what careers were listed as needing a history degree. Updated Oct 17: I have since learned that these career listings were generated by members of the department some time ago; I initially believed that the list was generated solely by admissions, and I apologize for the confusion. This paragraph has been edited to reflect that correction. See also the conclusion to this piece at bottom.

I used wget to download all of the career pages:

wget -r --no-parent -w 2 -l 2 --limit-rate=20k http://admissions.carleton.ca/careers/

I then copied all of the index.html files using the Mac finder (searched within the subdirectory for all index.html; copied them into a new folder).

Then, I used grep to figure out how many instances of capital-h History (thus, the discipline, rather than the generic noun) could be found on those career pages:

grep -c \<h3\>History *.html >history-results.tsv

I did the same again for a couple of other keywords. The command counts all instances of History in the html files, and writes the results to a tab separated file. I open that file in Excel. But – I don’t know what index 1.html is about, or index 45.html, and so on. So in text wrangler, I searched multiple files for the text betweentags, using a simple regex:

Copy and paste those results into a new page in the excel file, search and replace with blank spaces all of the extraneous bits (index, .html,and), sort by the file numbers, then copy and paste the names (now in the correct order) into a new column in the original count.

Which gives us this, insofar as History as a degree option leading to particular careers, (and where the numbers indicate not absolute importance of history, more of an emphasis than anything else):

Career	count of History
TeachingPage 2 of 3	4
Museums and Historical SitesPage 2 of 2	4
Heritage Conservation	4
TourismPage 2 of 2	2
ResearchPage 2 of 3	2
JournalismPage 2 of 3	2
Foreign ServicePage 2 of 3	2
EducationPage 2 of 3	2
Library and Information Science	2
Design	2
Archival Work	2
Architectural History	2
Archaeology	2

And here’s ‘Global’ (we have some new ‘Globalization’ programmes):

Career	count of Global
Tourism	12
Teaching	12
Research	12
Public Service	12
Polling	12
Politics	12
Policy Analysis	12
Non-Profit Sector	12
Non-Governmental Organizations	12
Museums and Historical Sites	12
Media	12
Lobbying	12
Law	12
Journalism	12
International Relations	12
International Development	12
Government	12
Foreign Service	12
Finance	12
Education	12
Diplomacy	12
Consulting	12
Conservation	12
Civil Service	12
Business	12
Advocacy	12
Administration	12
Foreign ServicePage 2 of 3	6
FinancePage 2 of 3	6
TeachingPage 2 of 3	4
Museums and Historical SitesPage 2 of 2	4
TourismPage 2 of 2	4
ResearchPage 2 of 3	4
JournalismPage 2 of 3	4
EducationPage 2 of 3	4
Public ServicePage 2 of 3	4
PollingPage 2 of 2	4
PoliticsPage 2 of 3	4
Policy AnalysisPage 2 of 3	4
Non-Profit SectorPage 2 of 2	4
Non-Governmental OrganizationsPage 2 of 3	4
MediaPage 2 of 2	4
LobbyingPage 2 of 3	4
LawPage 2 of 2	4
International RelationsPage 2 of 2	4
International DevelopmentPage 2 of 3	4
GovernmentPage 2 of 4	4
DiplomacyPage 2 of 3	4
ConsultingPage 2 of 3	4
ConservationPage 2 of 2	4
Civil ServicePage 2 of 3	4
BusinessPage 2 of 5	4
AdvocacyPage 2 of 2	4
AdministrationPage 2 of 4	4
Management	2
International Trade	2
International Business	2
Humanitarian Aid	2
Human Resources	2
Broker	2
Banking	2

Interesting, non? 

Update October 17 – we shared these results with Admissions. There appears to have been a glitch in the system. See those ‘page 2 of 3’ or ‘page 3 of 5’ notes in the tables above? The entire lists were visible to wget, but not to the user of the site, leaving ‘history’ off the page of careers under ‘museums and historical sites’, for instance. The code was corrected, and now the invisible parts are visible. Also, in my correspondence with the folks at Admissions, they write “[we believe that] Global appears more than History because careers were listed under each of its 12 specializations. We will reconfigure the way the careers are listed for global and international studies so that it will reduce the number of times that it comes up.”

So all’s well that ends well. Thank you to Admissions for clearing up the confusion, fixing the glitch, and for pointing out my error which I am pleased to correct.