I graduated in spring 2023 with a major in history, a minor in French, and two certificates in European Studies and Business French.
What I’m up to now?
I just recently moved to London for the first year of my graduate program. The name of my program is Policies and Governance in Europe. It’s pretty interdisciplinary, so I’m not just studying political science or global affairs or international relations. It draws on a bunch of different disciplines to come together into a program. But it is also a dual degree.
So this year I am studying in London with King’s College London, next year, moving to Rome to study with Louis University. And then at the end of next year I will have two different degrees from each of these schools, which is pretty exciting.
What brought me to history at UC?
It’s a long story, so I’ll keep it short.
Back in 2019, when I started at the university, I was a ballet major, actually with CCM, and I’ve always liked studying history, and I knew I wanted to do a minor or some kind of additional study with dance. I declared history as my minor, and I focused on those studies for a couple years and then going into my junior year.
Halfway through college, I had a foot surgery that took me out of the dance department for a year. So my junior year I took every single history class that I could to try to get as much of my degree done as I could. I did my history 4000 and my capstone in my junior year, which was a bit accelerated. I don’t recommend that. But that was done with the plan of me going back to CCM in my senior year and then taking a fifth year to finish the year that I had skipped for my BFA.
My surgery did not go to go as planned. I never ended up going back to dance. And so, on the first day of my senior year, I officially dropped out of the dance department and made history my primary major. Don’t recommend that either, but it all worked out. I had a great time in the history department. I wouldn’t have changed it for the world. The classes were great; the professors were great. But yeah, that’s how I got involved at with history at UC.
What did I focus on?
I primarily focused on early modern Europe, with a emphasis on the reformations and the history of Christianity. I’ve always thought that studying religion, but Christianity specifically as a tool of the state is so interesting in the development of Europe, and that impacted what I studied. My capstone is also impacting what I’m studying now. But, I mean, I took a bunch of different classes, but my favorites and the ones that I preferred to take focused on early modern Europe.
For my capstone, I studied the roles of Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn during the early years of the Anglican Reformation in England. So, I think we all know who Anne Boleyn is.
We probably all know who Catherine of Aragon is. And I think it’s safe to say that the memories of not just Henry’s first two wives, but all six are still very much popularized. I know there’s a musical called Six. I haven’t seen it yet, but, you know, their memories are still very much popularized today.
But as I was starting to read about them and about their roles in the Reformation, because I think it’s easy to say, like, it’s an easy conclusion, just say, “oh, Henry wanted a divorce, so he made a new church so he can marry Anne Boleyn”, which, yes, did happen. But that kind of takes Catherine and Anne and sticks them on the margins of history. I was kind of frustrated with that because they had a much more active role than I think most people realize in the early years of the Reformation. So, my capstone focused on kind of restoring their agency as women and Queens and mothers into your court within the history of the early years of the Anglican Reformation.
What skills did I pick up studying from history that have served me well beyond my courses?
So, it’s interesting, I was just having conversation last week with my personal tutor at King’s College about this. The classes that I’m in now, while they are very different from history in that I’m studying completely new field of study and kind of academic discipline, they’re the exact same layout as the history classes that we take at UC right.
It’s reading, it’s taking notes and coming to class prepared with your questions and talking points, ready to discuss and debate what you’ve read and back up your points with argument. I mean, in a very basic sense, the layout of my classes has been very useful for the new academic discipline that I’m studying.
But I think first and foremost, the research and analytical skills that you learn as a history major are second to none. It is not easy to be able to read [sources from]1520 and be able to put it all into a coherent and effective essay. That’s really not easy.
And then on that note too, history teaches you how to communicate really clearly because history is complicated. History can be very, very complicated. So, it takes a very certain kind of skill set to be able to take this mess of what happened in the past, break it down, and make it accessible and digestible for people today. Because I really do believe that without his, without the study of history were sunk. I mean, we can learn so much from the study of the past. And I think so many people don’t like the “study of histories” because it just reads. It’s like, why does this matter today? As history majors being able to communicate orally and in writing effectively what happened and be able to make it applicable today is so important.
Finally, I think this goes for any degree, but especially in history with our capstone being an independent research project, not every department and not every like major gets to do that. And that’s a really, really cool thing that you get to do in the history department is come up with your own piece of original research and that really challenged my time management and organizational skills.
Again, I think it all kind of goes back to how you can harness information and knowledge and use that in your study of history.
Because being able to read, I think I used, I don’t even Oh my God, I think I probably used 35 or 40 sources for my capstone. And before you can even start writing, you have to at least get through a certain number of that. So, you know what you’re talking about, right? But you’re doing that on top of your classes and on top of everything else. So I know that’s pretty capstone specific, but that was a big skill that history taught me how to do that.
I don’t think I would have gotten in another field of study.
Do I have any advice?
I think… OK, for current students take the classes that you don’t think are your cup of tea. The classes that I took that I was a little– so I talked about earlier my focus in early modern Europe. And I love I knew I was going to like those classes. But so, coming into undergraduate, I was really interested in studying World War II. That’s what I thought I wanted to study, and I took a couple classes and I kind of realized like maybe this isn’t for me.
Then, on a whim, I took detour. I took Dr. Haude’s Reformations class my junior year…. And I loved it and that completely changed the entire trajectory of my field of study. I mean even today. For example, we just selected our dissertation topics and I’m going to study the use of religious rhetoric in populist movements across in different I’m choosing for European countries or for European populist parties and analyzing their use of religious rhetoric. So I know I said a little bit earlier, the use of religion as a like tool of the state is really interesting to me, and I never would have kind of discovered that interest if I hadn’t just taken that class.
So even if you know what you like studying, even if you think you know what you want to focus on, it never hurts to branch out and take a class that you might be a little iffy about. Because those classes were the ones that I learned the most in and that pushed me the most to expand my skill set and my historical knowledge.
Thank you.
Link to video Interview: Ava’ Gyurcsik captioned .MOV
