Career Paths
What do religion majors do after majoring in religion? They do the same things that other humanities majors do, in roughly the same proportions. Many go to medical school, law school, or business school. A handful of them pursue advanced degrees in the study of religion or a neighboring discipline. Fewer still enter religious vocations. Majoring in religion is not, for most students, a route to a religious career, any more than majoring in English typically puts someone on a path toward becoming a novelist, a poet, or a literary critic. Like other forms of humanistic discipline, it does, however, have a tendency to broaden and deepen a student's understanding of the world and to sharpen his or her mind.
Religion majors, like most liberal arts concentrators at Princeton, follow many different paths after graduation. Most go into careers such as law, medicine, business, advertising, journalism, politics, teaching, foreign affairs, publishing and creative writing. Some choose to take a year or more off and spend their time working for social service programs such as Teach for America and the Peace Corps. A few go on to graduate school in religion, history, literature, philosophy, area studies and anthropology. A small number of our graduates enter seminaries and rabbinical schools.
We see the diversity of our majors' interests and the many paths they choose after graduation as evidence that the major in religion teaches skills of thinking, communicating and understanding.