Publishing internship skills for your resume and career

We graduate interesting and interested people with broad curiosities and varied but complementary skills. Oral and especially written communication skills are probably their greatest strong point, along with a taste and capacity for hard work: one doesn't learn Ancient Greek on a lark. Managing hard languages from ancient societies, and being able to imagine oneself into a culture far removed in time, distance and culture, require flexibility of mind and spirit and a willingness to take intellectual risks. Additionally, over the last 6-7 years I have noted an increased trend toward valuable group work and collaboration in a cross-disciplinary way, and more sophisticated work with computers (this trend is, of course, not restricted to our department). For example, one student (a double major in Art History) who wrote an honors thesis (and took the medal for the highest GPA in his graduating class) did some of his own programming. He designed some tools to track changes in pronunciation of Latin (as evidenced, for instance, in gravestones of soldiers) in France, Spain and elsewhere in Europe as vernacular languages began to emerge from Latin as the empire splintered.

Our students tend to take a few years before settling on a career path. Many go to law school (our most recent grad who did so got a boatload of money, which is pretty rare for law schools); historically, all our graduates who have applied have gotten into good placs, and most in top-20 institutions. The three other graduates of 2020 took different paths: one is working for a relative who runs a business essential to the COVID response; another (double major in Writing) spent time writing for a few specialist journals and has applied to an MA program; the other, a second-generation immigrant, plans to apply to graduate school in Europe after the pandemic calms.

Over half of our majors double major in another field (we even had one in Chemistry about 20 years ago), and that gives them added flexibility (History and English are the two most common other majors for our double majors). Even in these tough times for academia, we have had students apply to and get large fellowships and scholarships for further study in Classics or History (2 Ph.D. acceptances, 1 M.A. in the last 4-5 years). A good percentage go into secondary education (teaching Latin and, often, something else in high school or junior high); these tend to work toward getting a master's degree in teaching as they move through their first years of employment. A couple have taken jobs at Loyola in administration or student life and used the university's benefits to get a degree in another field: for example, one double History and Classics major (and Phi Beta Kappa) got an MBA at Loyola and is now working in administration at another university. A few more of our double majors (Art History is another common component) have worked in the publishing industry, sometimes starting on the ground floor as proofreaders and have then moved up. One of these then moved into a Ph. D. program in Linguistics in Europe and hopes to land in a think tank or government agency here or in the EU.

Over the last 10 years or so we have had graduates spend 2 or more years in service-related work (the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and Teach for America have been common destinations) before continuing with work in the religious sector or social work.