As previously established, bumping into people I haven’t
seen for a prolonged period of time causes me much anxiety. Since I’m finishing
Uni this year, the natural question that gets asked at these awkward meetings
is, ‘so what do you want to do when you finish studying?’ This is a pretty
ordinary question to ask and it’s not unexpected that someone might be
interested to know what you intend to do at the end of 16 years of regimented
learning. However, for people like me, the question can be jaw clenchingly
annoying. It’s not an annoyance at the person asking the question (because why
would they not?), it’s an annoyance of being reminded that you have absolutely no life plan.
I feel such envy for people that have studied vocational
courses. If you do medicine, you become a doctor. If you study teaching, you
become a teacher. There is a natural progression and knowing that you will
slide into the profession you want to do is such a luxury. Studying history
means there isn’t really a profession waiting for me at the end of my degree.
Obviously you get every third person saying ‘are you gonna become a
histoooorian? Are you gonna work in a museeeeeum?’ without really taking into
account that just because you have studied history it doesn’t mean you want to
spend your time in a dusty museum trying to stop people stealing dinosaur
bones. History is not vocational and ‘working in a museum’ is not the career at
the end of the history degree road. The problem is that there is no real
career.
History is a really interesting degree and I’m glad I did
it. I feel that I am a more rounded person for it and if nothing else, history
has taught me ‘how to think’. I absolutely resent anyone who says ‘what’s the
point in learning history? It’s in the past’. If you want to understand
anything about the world we live in today you need to know how we got to this
place. Without people studying history, we are doomed to repeat it (although
that seems to happen regardless of how many people studying history). History is a lot of writing essays. I would
argue there is more flexibility in writing a history degree than, say, an English
literature degree because there is no ‘looking for hidden messages’ and regurgitating
what your lecturer has told you. With a history essay you are able to take a
period in history and come to your own conclusions as to what event led to what
repercussions. Of course that leads to
potential failure when writing an essay because if your lecturer doesn’t agree
with what you are saying, you’re likely to find yourself hitting the 2:2
margin. Hard. I recently wrote an essay about the extent to which you could
call Hitler a weak dictator. To someone that hasn’t studied history it might
seem like a ridiculous question, but to a history student it is a question that
opens up all kinds of different avenues to study. The feedback on my essay said
that I’d obviously worked hard, deserved a good grade but my tutor didn’t agree
with my fundamental argument. I managed to scrape a 2:1 but it’s very
frustrating when your tutor is acknowledging your hard work but due to the
flexibility in historical arguments, I didn’t gain the mark I felt I deserved.
In a perfect world, I’d be aiming for a career in writing. I’d
love to work in journalism but I know that if my CV and a journalism student’s
CV were put in front of a potential employer, my CV probably wouldn’t make the
cut. It’s frustrating that, I would argue, history teaches you to write just as
much as a journalism degree does, but the title of the subjects means that a
journalism student will take precedence over me. Writing is a passion of mine,
but I chose to take a different path than the average journalism student and I
fear that will be to my detriment in the long run. I’m leaving university
feeling I have learnt a lot with my history degree, but that perhaps I should
have chosen a path in order to secure a more stable future life plan.
