As a person who was interested in archaeology at a young age, I have been trying to become an archaeologist for about half my life. Throughout this time, I have learned that there are different paths for becoming an archaeologist in the United States versus the United Kingdom.

I started my journey in the United States going to a four-year liberal arts university majoring in anthropology because the archaeology department was combined under the umbrella of the anthropology department. This is because, in the United States, there are four subcategories of anthropology: archaeology, cultural anthropology, biological anthropology and linguistic anthropology. At university, I found that even though the anthropology department may have 20 faculty members, maybe 5 of them were archaeologists all working in a similar area of the world. This meant that in a term, I might take one or two archaeology courses, and the remainder of my courses were from different categories of anthropology or general requirements because the university was a liberal arts school. A field school was not a requirement to graduate and would cost anywhere from a few hundred or thousands of dollars. My university had two field schools, one was in the United States, and the other was in Armenia. Neither field school interested me, so I started looking for my own.

I ended up finding one in the UK that really interested me, and it was the University of Liverpool field school. This is when I learned about all the differences between archaeology in the UK and US. When I got there and met the other students on the field school, I learned that the field school was a requirement for their course and they were doing a degree in archaeology and did not take courses in all the other parts of anthropology. I also learned that their bachelors were only three years compared to mine, which was four years. I also discovered masters degrees are only one year compared to in the US they are two years. This is when I decided that a one year cheaper masters program was precisely what I wanted to do once I finished my bachelors because even though I took archaeology courses, I felt like I was just scratching the surface of all the information I wanted to know. Even though both countries have a very different way of teaching archaeology, the combination of both I believe was the best way for me to get my education.