The ancient world is endlessly fascinating, and the languages of Greece and Rome are beautiful and challenging. Students who study Classics are consequently among the top scholars at Furman. Classics courses show employers that you are interesting and intelligent, devoted to learning, and unafraid of hard work.
Classics does not dictate a single career path for students: recent alumni have pursued medicine, law, seminary, graduate school, as well as jobs in the sciences, teaching, and business. Here is a list of what some of our alumni are doing after graduation:
University of Alabama Birmingham Medicine
Tufts University
The University of Leiden
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
The University of Leipzig
New York University School of Law
ScanSource
American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)
American University in Rome Cultural Resource Management
The National Security Agency (NSA)
University of Colorado School of Computer Science
Clemson University iCAR
Wake Forest University School of Business
United States District Attorney’s Human Trafficking task force
Fulbright Research Fellowship: Germany
Fulbright Research Fellowship: The Netherlands
Raymond James
The United States Army
Duke University Law School
What alumni say about studying Classics at Furman:
“Studying Classics at Furman opened up incredible opportunities for me, and I was well prepared for life after Furman (graduate school and then the workforce). I am a firm believer that by studying the past you are able better to understand the present and to inform your future. I may not be translating ancient texts in my job, but I am critically thinking, writing, and learning everyday. The Classics department curriculum hones these skills and their applications to the ‘real world’ are invaluable.”
— Kimbell Vincent-Dobbins, Classics major
“In the professional world, success means finding solutions to difficult problems. Studying Classics equipped me with the ability to utilize resources to tackle those problems head-on and a deep dissatisfaction with anything but first hand accounts. After achieving confidence decoding ancient manuscripts, annual reports and financial projections are familiar allies.”
— Patrick Rankowitz, Classics and Accounting major
“Studying Mediterranean Antiquity allows students to interrogate our own culture and think seriously about the underlying power of language. Classics is about developing a critical framework to evaluate text and the events that emerge from and respond to Classical Antiquity.”
— Elias Eells, Classics major