Preparing for a History Degree: Key Considerations for Students

Before starting a history degree, one needs to know that prior knowledge is not necessary, analytical skills are crucial, and independent research is essential.

### What to Know Before Starting a History Degree
* 📚 When starting a History degree, you don't need to know anything beforehand, as the academic environment provides all the **necessary resources for learning**.
* 🧠 The focus of a History degree is not on **memorizing dates or regurgitating facts** but on **developing analytical and critical thinking skills**.
* 🕰 Humanities degrees like History require a **significant amount of independent research and study** outside of contact hours.
* 🏫 The structure and teaching style of History degrees at the university level are different from high school, with an emphasis on **becoming an independent researcher**.
* 📧 Lecturers and academic staff are usually willing to help and can be contacted via **email or during office hours**.
* 📚 "It's about what you learn while you're there, and yes, it's going to be **tougher than school**, and there's going to be a **lot more information than in school**, and the expectations are going to be **different than from school**."
* 🧠 "The reason you study history and the reason you become a historian is to become a better researcher, is to **learn analytical and critical thinking skills**."
* 🏫 "If you do, however, feel like you would like to talk more with your lecturers or your Tutors or other members of staff at your University, they will most likely have like **office hours or email addresses**."

hi everyone welcome back to my Channel or welcome if you're new. today as I'm sure you can tell by the title I'm going to be talking about what you need to know before you undertake a history degree or more generally even a Humanities degree. because there's a lot of overlap with what I'm going to talk about in this video and the humanities disciplines in general and what you may experience at University or college. and that's not to say this video is purely for those who are about to go into their first year of study. these very well may be helpful reminders if you're already studying if you're already underway with your degree. and although not all of the advice will be some of it may even just be helpful for those of you who are deciding to undertake some history study in your free time. so yeah these are the things I think are really important some of which I wish I'd been informed of before I started my history and Classics degree and that I think will be most

helpful to those of you about to or currently undertaking this topic. For reference, if you're wondering why on Earth you should even take advice from me, my background is in ancient history, specifically. So, I did a classical studies degree for my undergraduate. I then did a Classics master's degree, and I have since acquired a PhD specializing in ancient Athenian rhetoric. And all of that began in the year 2010, long, long, long ago in the past. So, I'm coming on 13 years of experience now of both being a student, being a historian, being a writer, and being a lecturer. So, for extra reference, I also spent two years across my time as a PhD student lecturing. I both lectured as a guest lecturer in other courses. I did one lecture or two lectures as part of other people's courses. And I also ran my own courses for undergraduates in their first and second years. So, although we are all informed by our own experiences and biases, I do have both the experience being a student and a lecturer, which

think can perhaps um you know tie some things together for you in your mind when you are studying history or becoming part of the academic world. So yeah, I wanted to you know share with you what I thought was important before you started or while you're there. Things I told my students, things I wish I'd been told as a student, and just little reminders that you may have already heard but like I said maybe useful reminders. So without further Ado, let's crack on with the advice, shall we? So the first and biggest point I'm going to make in this video might sound a little bit counter-intuitive, but the biggest thing you need to know before you start any kind of History degree is absolutely nothing. I think there is certainly pressure, and there can be a feeling of expectations that when you start your first year of study, um at a college or at a university wherever you're at, even in your classes at school, is that you come to your subject with a pre-existing knowledge base in that subject, even if

it's quite basic, and that might involve having read some famous texts. It might involve having read some broad, far-reaching non-fiction titles. It might involve, in my discipline, the feeling that you need to have studied Latin or Greek. And the issue here, um, is that this largely then affects people from different class backgrounds, particularly here in the UK. I know myself, having come from a working-class background, having gone to state school, that my education did not provide me with the same, like I mentioned, pre-existing knowledge that a lot of the kids or young adults I was studying alongside had in my subject, that they had garnered from perhaps having access to these subjects at school. And obviously, there's nothing wrong with having maybe already read The Odyssey or having read Martin Luther King before you get to university and having that little bit of basic knowledge that you might find useful. But there is absolutely no need for you to. You're not coming into an environment where you're about to be examined on knowledge you garnered before you got to this.

institution, you're about to be examined and write essays and develop um knowledge around a subject that you are being taught and encouraged to research within that academic environment, and therefore all the knowledge is there for you. The library is there, the online resource resources are there, the lecturers are there, your lecture notes are there, your tutorials are there, any material you're given is there. As somebody who marked exams and set essay questions, I wasn't basing any of that on things I expected my students to know before they got to University. It's about what you learn while you're there, and yes, it's going to be tougher than school, and there's going to be a lot more information than in school, and the expectations are going to be different than from school. As long as you show up and try your hardest and um interact with the material you're given, do your independent research, ask questions, and you know, embrace your subject matter, you don't need to have come to it with those things. And I know when you turn up on day one, week one, it can feel a little

bit intimidating if there are others around you who know more regardless of their background. That if maybe again I'm going to use Classics references here because it's um like my primary area, but this applies to um all of the history degrees that you might do, um who have read The Odyssey, who have read The Iliad, who are familiar with Homer's work, who have even read like Marcus Aurelius, and you haven't because I hadn't. I did not turn up having read those things. My introduction to my subject area was through documentaries and museums and pop culture and a keen curiosity that I developed over years of absorbing those things but not having looked at the original material itself. Like I'd never studied Antiquity in school. I never sat down with an ancient text and read it over. I didn't know any Latin or Greek, and none of that mattered. The only place it mattered was in my head, and that was temporary because in the long run it made no difference, and I managed to complete my degree. I learned

so many things, and I loved it all. For me, it was that opportunity to finally have access to those things at University that I'd never had access to before or even thought to look into before. So you don't need to know anything before you go to do your history degree because you'll learn it all there, and you'll discover it all there. You'll go and independently research it all when you're there. Don't worry if somebody else has read something or knows something because you're all fresh, and your lecturer is approaching the subject as if you're all fresh. But on the other hand, if you'd like to go out there and read some introductory texts or enjoy some books that might be related to your degree, do it. Like, why wouldn't you do something that you find interesting? But don't do it because you think you have to. Don't do it because you feel you need to come to your degree on the same fitting as somebody else. Do it because you're interested in the subject, and then you

might even find that the stuff you learn before you get to universe first year college is wrong. There's a lot of books out there that are written by people who don't necessarily have the research expertise. That might be interesting and might give you a window into a culture and a society in a historical period, but sometimes perpetuate facts that are false. Or perhaps you're really into Greek mythology or a historical period in time, and you like to discuss it on online forums and read about it online. There can be some great information out there. I myself like to put information out there on the internet, but there's also a lot of nonsense. So like you might get to UNI and find out something you've been reading about or thought about something is actually not true, and that's okay too. Like we're all learning, and honestly some of the stuff you'll learn in first year of University you'll find out isn't exactly what you thought it was by the time you're in your final year because history has nuance and um sources have

biases, and that's all okay. Basically, what you think is constantly going to be challenged University, and that's one of the beautiful things about it. And that brings us to point number two because I'm going to call that point number one even though I rambled on a little bit, and that is a reminder that you're not going to University or college to study a Humanities topic, to study history, or Classics in order to learn to regurgitate dates. Another thing I think is um very easy to feel a lot of pressure around first when you when you first start studying, and when you first start learning these topics, and you first start attending college University or even you know in your second year or your third year. It doesn't necessarily go away, and it's something we might have to remind ourselves um is that you're you're bombarded with a lot of information. You know you're going to your lectures a few hours a week, you're going to your tutorials if you're a week, you're reading material you've been provided by your course.

you're maybe reading books outside of that that you think are interesting, and all of that might make you feel like you need to memorize it. But the point of a history degree and the discipline of history is not about learning a bunch of facts that you can then regurgitate. Don't get me wrong, facts are very useful. Dates can also be very useful. But in my experience as an ancient historian, and in my discussions with other ancient historians, we can look up dates. And particularly, I think exams where you sit down in a hall and you don't have any resources to look at, and you just have to remember things, are a bit misleading in the sense that they make you think that again memorizing stuff, and memorizing little details like dates, is the most important thing. But I think there's a more and more of a movement within like younger Scholars to get rid of those kind of examinations and focus on things like essay writing and coursework that you can do at home.

where you've got resources to look at them. But regardless of that, yeah, there might be an occasion where you have to remember a date, and you have to write down where the specific piece of art is from and when it was created. But generally speaking, that is not why you are there. If you want to just learn a bunch of dates, in fact, to read a book, you don't need a history degree to do that. The reason you study history and the reason you become a historian is to become a better researcher, is to learn analytical and critical thinking skills, which can then be useful in all aspects of life, even if you decide not to pursue a career in history after you've done your degree. There is no underestimating analytical and critical research skills, like those are very important and very transferable, let me tell you. So this is something that I wish I'd enforced more as a lecturer. It's something I mentioned at the beginning of my courses, um, but I feel like I should have said it at the beginning of every single lecture.

because introductory lectures and specific lectures and often introductory to topic lectures can very much focus heavily on this is what happened which is obviously really important. I'm not saying you don't go to university to learn about history if you're going to do a history degree, but then I know I can feel for the students sitting in the seat, a lot of pressure to memorize those days. But then again, like I mentioned to somebody who set essays and coursework, whether you could memorize a date meant nothing to me. What I cared about and what all lecturers care about when it comes to essays and coursework is that you demonstrate those analytical skills. So what you're hoping to learn from your courses and over your degree is that whilst all this wonderful information is amazing and you get to learn about it and consider it, what you really want to take away from all of that experience is that you can sit down with a text, whether it's a primary source or a secondary source, and

analyze that piece of information from a critical perspective. From an analytical perspective, you can weigh up its biases. You can consider what are both the benefits and the flaws in that piece of evidence, whether it's a short shard of pottery or a poem by Sappho. And as somebody who has a PhD, who spent years writing this 70,000-word piece of research on an original topic, I kept forgetting dates. Like, ask me when the Peloponnesian War was, and I think I could tell you the decades, but I can never remember the exact date. Maybe I'm showing myself up here by admitting that. But unless I was in the moment of writing about the career anymore, which I did a lot, it would sort of fade. Like that little specification would go somewhere else because that's not what the point of my research was about. Obviously, dates are important in order to contextualize when things happened before or after other things, what was going on at the time.

can check them. You can check a date. Meanwhile, what was important was my ability to analyze one um political speech in the context of the politics and the rhetoric being used and um in comparison to other political texts. Like that's what mattered. And I also have now just realized I've been calling it the Cairo knew more. It was the Battle of Chironia because it was part of the wars with Macedonia. It wasn't the Chironian war. So look at me just showing myself up. Even I forget facts or phrases, and it doesn't matter. It does not matter. But does not undermine my abilities as an ancient historian. So I guess to summarize, memorizing dates or regurgitating like the minutia of historical detail is not what you should be looking to um take away from a history degree. That's great if you have the kind of mind that just memorizes dates really easily. Very jealous over here. That's fantastic. But what you want to take away is research skills and um the ability to analyze information.

understanding different sources and their biases. The difference between primary and secondary material. Learning to contextualize information. To weigh up different arguments from and other historians and their opinions and what you find the most convincing. And um just simply to learn how to critically consider what you're looking at. Now my last point is actually a very practical point on the way that Humanities degrees like history are structured and taught and um will be experienced particularly in the UK. Now I know this is true for other countries but I do want to preface by saying my experiences with UK universities and that largely you sure your day-to-day structure of your degree and your contact hours are going to be so different from your prior experiences of Education if all you've done before going to University is high school. High school and University are very very different. That's not to say you don't come away with some useful skills from high school that may then be useful at University but they are very different and particularly with the humanities history or Classics degree.

you are not going to have as much face-to-face time with the people who are teaching you, and that is because of 0.2 you are at University to learn these analytical skills, which require you to become an independent researcher. One of the things that you will have to adjust to at University is arranging your time so that you are learning, working, researching, analyzing, whatever you're doing outside of class time too. Your whole course may only be nine hours of life pictures and like six hours of tutorials a week. It might be more than that, it might be a little bit less than that depending on your course load, but that doesn't mean your degree is only 15 hours a week. A large amount of the time you spend at University, especially as you get further into your degree, is about independent research. It's about, you know, like sitting on your laptop and scrolling through and reading articles. It's about learning what current people are seeing in your field, even if that means, you know, like following them on Twitter and seeing what they're talking.

about it means maybe sitting in the library and like making notes or writing up essays or going to like optional like guest lectures or conferences. That nobody said you had to go to, but some of them are useful. You don't have to go to all of them either, but like you know it's about taking that initiative to spend time outside of your classes doing the work. Because if you literally just spend every day eight hours a day in class with a lecture being told facts, there would be no point in you being there. Because again that's not why you do a history degree. It's to develop skills that require you to sit in work by yourself or with others on group projects. And remember that there is also a lot of material provided to you for your course. Every lecture is different, they might set you a whole book to read throughout your course, they might provide um random texts every week, they might provide primary stuff, secondary stuff. There might be mandatory things and then optional things, whatever they are. And you're not going to fail if

you miss like one reading or whatever um, but the time you spend interacting with that material and reading it, whether it's before class, after class, whether it's with others or by yourself, is also part of your learning time and your um development time at University. And I particularly think this is an important point to raise in terms of history and degrees because if you have a friend that's perhaps um at nursing school or um studying a scientific topic, they might have a lot more contact hours than you. It varies with every degree in University, but there are some disciplines which have more contact towers, and that might be because they have a lot more like practical aspects of their subject that involve like lab time or work experience in hospitals and or shadowing other people. And if you compare your own course to theirs, it might seem a little bit odd or confusing um, but I think it's important to understand why you don't get as many contact hours. If you do, however, feel like you would like to talk more with your lecturers or your Tutors or other

members of staff at your University, they will most likely have like office hours or email addresses. I mean, everyone has an email address, pretty much, and they'll have an email address that you can contact them in. They probably won't reply to you at 10 pm on a Saturday. They have lives too that they don't get paid um to work over the weekend, but they should be willing to help you. Um, I was always really happy if, uh, if a student stayed behind after class to talk to me. Um, because I didn't have anything I needed to run to next when I was teaching my introduction to ancient history course. Thank you, truck. Um, I really, really appreciated when a student stayed behind or came to talk to me during our break. Because as much as you might think, Oh, maybe this is a silly question, or I don't want to look like I didn't understand everything, or I want to appear like I'm just like I'm Easy Breezy and everything's fine for me, it showed me that they had um interacted to some extent with the

what we were learning in the material that they had a real interest and passion for Learning, and it made me feel really good if I could help them. I would much rather as a lecturer have students who email me questions, who ask me questions after class, then just sit, just sit, and worry. Like I said, everyone has life outside of their job too as well, and that applies to lectures and academic staff as well. So, also be understanding of your lecturers, and you know, they might have to run away to pick up their kids or whatever, but I think there's a really good balance where lecturers and students can work together to make Academia a better place and to make learning more accessible and just better. So, yeah, those are my hopes for the future and for the UK government to cease underfunding and discouraging the study of Arts and Humanities and history both at a school and academic level, which results in the closing of departments that have given access to these subjects to kids from

backgrounds who maybe never got to access them before wouldn't that be nice. Let's keep you know fighting for that as well. So those were the three things I thought were probably most important to cover for those about to start a history degree or who are about to go to their second year of History degree or considering doing a history degree, what have you. I certainly didn't want to overload this video or you with information so I hope I struck a balance of like useful and points reassuring points, but without you know making you feel overwhelmed. If you do have any questions, um, whether you're thinking of studying these subjects or currently studying these subjects or about to start studying these subjects or just have a general curiosity, then do leave them in the comments down below. I'm always happy to help, um, and to answer what I can or to like engage in the direction of someone or something that might be better placed to help with that question or recommend books if you're just generally interested in history or ancient history.

So yeah, that is pretty much it for me. Hope you found this useful. Good luck with all your studies, and I'll see you all again in the next one. Bye, everyone.

What You Need to Know Before Your History Degree

Ancient Historian & Author. I create videos on literature, ancient history, and pop culture.

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Jean's Thoughts

What You Need to Know Before Starting a History Degree

Before starting a history degree, you don't need to have any pre-existing knowledge in the subject, which can be a relief for those from different class backgrounds.

There is a common pressure to have prior knowledge, but it is not necessary for success in the program.

This advice is based on 13 years of experience as a student, historian, writer, and lecturer, aiming to provide helpful reminders for those undertaking history studies.

The Value of Independent Research in a History Degree

In a history degree, it is not necessary to have prior knowledge, as the university provides all the resources for learning.

The focus is on independent research, curiosity, and embracing the subject matter.

Pre-existing knowledge may sometimes be inaccurate, and the university experience will shape and change one's understanding of history.

Studying history in college is not about memorizing dates and facts, but rather about developing research and critical thinking skills.

The pressure to memorize information may be overwhelming, but the focus should be on analytical skills for essays and coursework.

The ultimate goal of a history degree is to become a better researcher and to gain transferable analytical and critical thinking skills.

The Value of a History Degree and the University Experience

Memorizing specific dates and details is not the most important aspect of a history degree; instead, the focus is on developing research and analytical skills.

History degrees emphasize the ability to analyze information, understand biases, and critically evaluate sources and arguments.

The structure of humanities degrees, like history, in the UK involves less face-to-face time with instructors and more emphasis on independent research and learning outside of class.

Taking the initiative to engage in optional activities outside of classes is crucial for skill development.

Different university degrees have varying levels of contact hours, depending on the practical aspects of the subject.

Utilizing the office hours and email addresses of lecturers and tutors can greatly benefit your learning and understanding of the course material.

The Importance of Supporting Arts and Humanities Education

Lecturers value students who actively engage with the material and show a passion for learning.

There is a need for a better balance between lecturers and students to improve academia.

Underfunding of arts, humanities, and history education needs to be addressed to provide access to a wider range of students.