This can pretty much be applied to a lot of majors, especially in the liberal arts. But I am a history major so I am writing from my own personal experiences and struggles here. Check out some of the problems history majors face!
1. You enjoy textbooks.
You read them for fun, and no one quite understands why you enjoy them so much. The library has to remind you that you can only have 250 books checked out at once. What they don't know is that you have your own collection of books you own in your room. You sleep with the books in your bed, you have stacks of the books around your room, and you are constantly carrying around enough books to get a strength workout. You may or may not have considered making a throne out of your books.
2. You are obsessed with one particular person in history.
This is your history crush; you would date your history crush if you could. You wonder what it would be like to be friends with your history crush. One does not make fun of another's history crush unless you want to end a friendship. You may or may not have considered getting a tattoo inspired by your history crush.
3. You are constantly writing essays/papers.
An 8-page paper quickly becomes meaningless when you're a history major. Depending on the topic or structure, you could probably finish it in two hours, let alone if you have an entire night. You no longer fear assignments until they are supposed to hit the 15-20 page mark. This one kind of holds true for most of the social sciences and humanities. Papers are a part of academia; being able to write a good paper quickly is a valuable skill.
4. You probably get endless questions about what you could possibly do with your degree.
An existential life crisis ensues as you question your entire life and all your choices. Then you remember that you love history, and you will figure things out as long as you are happy. There is always the academia route, museum studies, library science, archival work, public history, etc. You can handle the future, when you have to.
5. You enjoy documentaries.
See #1 for how people react to this. They are movies based on the books you love so much. Why would it be strange to love them? This doesn't mean you love all documentaries or that you don't get upset if they don't include some fact or say something wrong. There is a possibility that you yell at the narrator of the guest academics for something you don't agree with or if they bash your history crush. You long for the day that the History Channel goes back to showing documentaries instead of pawn shops and truckers.
6. You have a strange sense of humor.
You make history jokes that only people familiar with your field and time period understand. Your friends find it even less funny when you then feel the need to give them a history lecture so that they can find the joke funny too. They just decide to laugh along like they understand why what you said was funny just to avoid the inevitable lecture.
7. Everyone says history was their least favorite subject.
You tell them your major, and they cringe, telling you how awful and boring their high school history teacher was. You then feel a need to right the wrongs of their past teachers, but there is no hope. This person is most likely going to keep on disliking what you are passionate about.
8. You are disappointed by History Channel.
They sold out, in your opinion, and you long for the days of documentaries from your childhood. Even if their were the same documentaries every time, it was still better than pawn shops, miners, and truckers. History is made everyday, but seriously, they are taking that too literally. See #5 about the overwhelming love of a nice documentary.
9. You have to take history classes outside your specialty.
This isn't awful and gives you a wider range of knowledge and the connections of history around the world, but it is still painful because you wanted to take that Black Plague course but are stuck in a course on the Reconstruction. This is where you understand what the person in #7 was talking about.
10. Not only does everyone else question your major, but sometimes you do too.
It isn't that you don't love history or regret your major, but as graduation looms nearer, you have no idea what you want to do with your life and just think, well, graduate school is always an option. Some people know what they want to do with their history degree, but everyone isn't that figured out when the caps and gowns are coming out.
In the end, you studied something you loved, and there are a lot more careers out there than you could possibly think of on your own. It is okay because there are always other history majors out there who understand your quirks and obsession with that one person from history.
