Which Career is Best for Arts Students in 2025? There are hundreds of career options available after graduation for students of Arts stream or with a Political Science background. After your graduation, you can prepare for graduate-level jobs; and the other option is to go for post-graduation studies. In the government sector, most of the jobs (apart from teaching in higher levels of education, and a few selected positions) are eligible for graduates. So, as a graduate, you are eligible to apply for SSC, banking, all kinds of clerical jobs, etc. But it is to be noted that you will need to have proficiency in computers, along with a bachelor’s degree.
Which Career is Best for Arts Students in 2025?
Regarding post-graduation, apart from pursuing a master’s in Arts stream or English Literature, Political Science, you can go for an MBA; a post-graduate degree or a diploma in Hotel Management, Tourism Management, Rural Management, or Mass Communication (preferably from IIMC); Development Studies from IIT Guwahati; Library Science, etc. You can also choose Teaching as your profession.
Apart from teaching, you can choose from one of the few options mentioned below:
1. Journalism/Mass Communication: You can work as a journalist or content writer in a newspaper or a corporate house. You can also apply for jobs in PR agencies as they look for English graduates frequently.
2. Writing a book: This is very lucrative, and it comes with immense respect. Some organisations even pay money for a year to write a book.
3. Freelancing: As a freelancer, you can write for others, blog, do translations, edit, etc. There are many online forums available with various freelancing opportunities.
4. Working in the corporate sector: English graduates are often sought for roles in corporate communication, technical writing, etc. For this, you need to have proficiency in writing, which will come with practice.
5. Higher studies: Try to do a master’s or a PhD from a reputed university Oxford or Cambridge.
You can become a Judicial Magistrate
To become a Judicial Magistrate, you need to appear and clear the State Judicial Service Exam. In general, the high court of every state conducts this exam. In Assam, the Gauhati High Court conducts this exam. You can browse through the website of Gauhati High Court for further details.
However, one of the important eligibility criteria to sit for this exam is that the applicant has to be a law graduate. The examination is held in three successive stages the preliminary exam, mains exam, and interview. The syllabus for this examination varies from state to state. It is broadly divided into civil law, criminal law, and a language paper. However, to appear for this examination, a bachelor’s degree in law (LLB) is a must. If you want to become a Judicial Magistrate, then I would suggest that you enroll for the three-year LLB course after you complete your BA in English. You can appear for this examination in your final year of LLB or after completing LLB. For pursuing law in India’s topmost law universities, you need to appear for an exam called CLAT (Common Law Admission Test).
You can become a Political Strategist
Political strategist was not known to be a professional career in India until a few years ago. In other democracies such as the US and UK, there are groups of people who are engaged as strategists during elections. However, in our country, it is mainly the politicians that act as strategists. With the incoming of Prashant Kishor, particularly after the 2014 Lok Sobha elections, many started seeing this as a professional career. The above background is important as you won’t find this profession as a mainstream career path. There is no course that you can study or any organisation where you intern or work a full-time job as a political strategist. You can take this informality of the sector as an opportunity. Mentioned below is a way to go ahead with your goal. However, this is not the only way and it should be considered as one of your many options.
The first thing is that you must love politics. Then you must develop proper knowledge of the sitting MLA/MPS, boundaries of constituencies. Racial and demographic profiles of the voters should be at your fingertips. Then you must volunteer your service for some politician/political party. Election campaigns are getting bigger and bigger, and the roles of professionals are increasing. You may also try to work with MPs through Swaniti fellowship, LAMP fellowship, etc. Please check the job postings of I-PAC (Indian Political Action Committee), which was formed by Prashant Kishor. Try to develop your political acumen. Talk to the people on the ground, and gather information. Create a value for knowledge that the politicians don’t possess.
You can become an IFS Officer
You can join the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) by getting a good rank in the Civil Services Examination (CSE) conducted by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC). At this stage, the most important thing for you is to read the newspaper regularly, watch debates on Rajya Sabha TV or any other good news channel (not the political debates, of course) and take part in discussions with your friends on the current issues facing the country. The newspaper should be ideally The Hindu or The Indian Express. Read the editorials and opinion-based articles to get a good sense of the various topics that are asked in the UPSC exam. They will be helpful for your overall intellectual development.
Finally, you have at least three years till you write the UPSC exam. A lot can change till then, including the possibility of a change in the exam syllabus and addition/omission of subjects as has happened in the past. So, choose your subject as per your likes and interests rather than from the perspective of clearing the exam. After all, a large fraction of candidates clearing the exam are engineers who have never studied any humanities subject after Class X. What is important is that you remain aware of the issues facing the country, and engage in debates and discussions during these three years.
You can become an APSC Officer
Like many public service commission exams, APSC also has a three-tier system. The first stage is a preliminary examination, where you have to appear for a General Studies paper and one optional subject, each of 200 marks with a two-hour duration. The next stage is a mains exam where you will again have a General Studies paper and a General English paper, which is common for all candidates. In addition, in the mains exam, you will have to choose two optional subjects, which will again have separate papers that you will have to appear for. The full syllabus of the prelims and mains exam can be found on the APSC website: http://apsc.nic.in. The last stage is a personal interview with a panel of examiners.
There is an upper age limit of 38 years for general category aspirants and everyone should have at least a Bachelor’s degree in any subject recognised by UGC. You should first look at the syllabus and identify your optional subject, and look into the General Studies topics. Once you have an idea, then you should start reading relevant books, magazines and newspapers every day to keep up with current affairs. You should look for someone in your network who has already appeared or cleared the exam and get pointers on specific topics about what to study. There are several previous years’ question papers available online, which might also give you some idea of how to proceed.