Is studying history outdated? Quite the opposite!
Is studying history outdated? Quite the opposite!
By Signe Skov Jensen, about to enter her final year as a History student at UCL
If you’re reading this, you might already have an interest in history. I want you to hold on to that interest and nourish it! It has been my experience in my home country, Denmark, that people will react with disguised condescendence and ask “so, what do you plan to do with that, become a librarian?” when they hear that I study history. In the UK, however, that experience has been completely different. Here people smile at me with acknowledgement, knowing that there is a tradition for MPs and other prominent leaders of the country to have studied either PPE, Law, or, of course, History.
Personally, I chose to study history because of nothing but my interest in the subject. If I wanted to complete a university degree, I would do it by studying something that I thoroughly enjoyed and use the general research skills that it gave me to focus on something different for my graduate studies. That is the thing about studying history in the UK: it opens more doors than you would believe for both Master’s available to you and jobs. Alumni from my university’s history department have gone on to become lawyers and politicians to finance banking, project managers or the UN.
At UCL, my professors and my peers have made me thrive. Since year 1, I have been able to choose almost all of my modules freely, and with UCL being renowned for its international outlook, I have studied everything from Middle Eastern to Chinese and Latin American history. While the department offers modules in European history, it is never completely Eurocentric material being taught, but rather wants us to understand history as it may be perceived by different cultures around the world. In light of Black Lives Matter rooting itself in the UK this spring, a movement was pushed forward to decolonize school curriculums, and I am proud to say that in UCL’s history department – though there are still improvements to be made – that studying racial and sexual minority history has been a tradition for years.
My professors have all travelled the world for their studies and they are some of the most compelling characters I have met in a long time. When you put that together with a student body within our course being divided across multiple nationalities from Asia, Europe and the Americas, our seminars never get boring. It is amazing h0w different we analyze current and past societies depending on what experiences and cultural norms we ourselves grew up with in our individual political systems, and I would not want to be without these discussions for the world. They engage you intellectually in a way I could have never dreamed of if I would have stayed in Denmark for my studies.
Studying history has made me see the world in a new light. There are not just two sides to a story but multiple, and as time passes by our societies, I feel that I see history with all its nuances in the making; that is why studying history has been so rewarding to me. Studying the past have made me highly aware of the present and the dangerous political and social patters that recreate themselves as per an eternal cycle – but that is also what makes us able to see how we best can fix them!
