By Thomas Fleischman, Director of Undergraduate Studies
It is almost a year now since I began the job of Director of Undergraduate Studies, a position that has allowed me to truly appreciate how many exceptional colleagues and impressive students call the History Department their home.
I’d like to thank my predecessor, Dr. Pablo Sierra, for the work he did to sustain and enhance our program. Not only did he oversee our undergraduate program through the depths of the Covid crisis, implementing remote teaching and grading for faculty and students on the fly, but he also dealt with the long-term reverberations to student life and learning since.
In addition, Dr. Sierra also revamped the honors program during his tenure. Wanting to provide more time for project development, more research and travel resources, and more rewards for our honors students, Dr. Sierra implemented a three-semester sequence for the program. It now begins in the junior year, helping students develop their projects, find archives, and apply for research grants all before the summer of their senior year. Our honors students now return to campus ready to immediately begin writing their theses. These programmatic changes have boosted the quality of our honors projects across the board and made the experience more rewarding for our students in the long run. All of this would not have been possible without Dr. Sierra.
When I first began this job, I knew there’d be a lot of work, but few told me how much fun it would be. And nothing tops presiding over the undergraduate portion of our commencement ceremony. Our recent class of 2022 is an impressive bunch, with graduate schools for law, medicine, and social sciences in their futures, plans to live and work abroad, and shiny new careers in healthcare, journalism, and advocacy work.
In their final exit survey, we asked the class of 2022 what they most cherished about their history training. And the answers were nearly all the same: the ability to read and analyze enormous amounts of writing quickly, and the ability to write complex, deeply-sourced, and well-organized papers. It was a couple months later that I was talking to an anxious parent about what their child could do with a history degree, and I said, while pointing to our recent graduating class, “well, anything.”
The work of the DUS, however, is never done. I, and my colleagues in the department, have more plans. We are continuing to expand our student outreach, using new social media platforms like TikTok, but also turning to more analog forms of advertising, like course postcards, which we began printing and distributing this year. Not only do they provide something tactile for students to take home while they consider their course registrations, the postcards also look good on a wall.
In addition, we are planning an annual history department logo design competition, the winner of which will be featured on an array of swag, like stickers, t-shirts, and sweatshirts. More perks for our undergrads will include a study lounge, more study breaks with food, an honors banquet after the public defense in the spring, and new course offerings over the coming semesters.
The Department of History is growing. The number of majors in our program and undergraduates in our classes has been rising steadily over the past five years. We are known amongst the students as a department with first-rate scholars and teachers, offering classes on compelling topics and organizing innovative, project-based assignments. Our secret is out. And I intend to continue to make the Department of History a place where students want to be.