On History Majors

For those of you who don’t know, I will be graduating with a Masters in Teaching from VCU this May! I got my Bachelors in History at VCU, and I cannot stress to you enough how much I hated sitting in my history classes throughout my first 4 years of college. It was nothing personal, really. I loved all most of my professors and I adored all of the familiar faces that turned into friends near the end of my senior year. The content was great and my appreciation for history grew each time I finished a course at the university. I learned a lot about the subjects I was studying, but I learned even more about history majors themselves. I would like to pass my intimate history-major-related knowledge on to my readers.

History majors love to read. Okay, maybe that’s a pretty broad statement… I’ll rephrase it. History majors have to learn how to love to read. Seriously. I remember the second semester of my sophomore year being complete hell because I took three upper level history courses at the same time. My social life was non-existent (see next paragraph) and I lived on a steady diet of aspirin and Mountain Dew. I had a never ending headache because all I did was stare at the readings online all.day.long. I’d sometimes have to read 80 something pages a day. Per class!

History majors have no friends. We only have our books… our sweet, dusty books. #HistoryMajorProblems 

History majors like to hear themselves talk. So many classes have dragged on and on as some bearded hipster droned endlessly about the Hippocratic Method, the assassination of the Archduke, or the major impacts Jim Crow laws had on 20th century America. I’m not going to lie, I have walked out of class in the middle of their monologues before. I really think it’s the professor’s responsibility to tell them to shut up, since I am paying the professor to educate me and not the grubby hipster, after all. I am so convinced of this one that nobody can tell me otherwise, which brings me to my next point.

History majors always think that they are right. In order to prove it, they write books about why they are right. Then they write books disputing other history majors’ opinions. Then those history majors write books disputing the books that disputed their original opinions. It’s endless.

We love what we do, and that is why we are so passionate about it. Do you honestly think we would hole up inside of our cluttered studio apartments to read about the Great Potato Famine if we weren’t genuinely in love with history? Do you believe that we are only history majors because it’s “not a real major” and we are “too lazy” to major in something like biology or engineering? No, no. I am here to tell you that not everybody could be a history major. It’s tough, and I learned just how tough it was by jumping through all of the necessary hoops to earn my degree in it. 

You have to LOVE history to MAJOR in it. If the passion isn’t there, you are going to have a hard time sticking to it and graduating. Hopefully I can instill the same love and passion that I have for history into my future students! I would be elated if a few of them evolved into bearded hipsters, droning on and on in class about what they love.