Embedded Files
Recent graduate Anna talks about the highs and lows of her masters
6 October 2023
By Anna Edwards
Hi, I’m Anna and I’ve just recently graduated from my MA in Historical Research (yep, still weird to say). The dissertations in, U-card expired and whilst I chill in the purgatory between student and adult life, I thought I’d write a blog and give you some survival tips for the year ahead. Hopefully, in a way that is non preachy, not cringe and kind of helpful.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I didn’t go into my masters fully knowing what I was in for. I like history, loved my undergraduate- why wouldn’t I do another year? So, as I made my way into my first seminar, and heard the profound voices of the mature students, the international students, the anthropologists and the sociologists, my jaw was on the floor. Where are these people getting all these ideas from? Where did they get the time to do all this reading? It all became very real very quickly. This wasn’t just a regular degree. The seminars came and went, and for the first time in my life I stayed completely silent.
However, as week after week went by, I sat there and I listened, and against all odds, things started to make more sense. I made new friends, and I became impressed rather than intimidated. Eventually, I began to speak up. So that’s really my first piece of advice, if you’ve not felt confident enough to contribute in your first few seminars, you don’t need to. You’ll learn a lot from listening. Don’t let the new and smart voices in your classes overwhelm you.
Plus, these new and smart voices become especially helpful when it comes to essay time. All these new people, passionate about history, who really want to do well, gave me a real push forward. The passion everyone seems to have at MA level is really contagious. So I followed the lead of my classmates, starting early and using my essays as a way to explore interests I’d always had but never written on. I wrote about things like psychology and the holocaust, trauma in boarding schools, environmental protest, the history of stress. Powered by my love for what I was writing about, and encouraged by everyone else’s work ethic, I found myself a lot more motivated to write MA essays than undergraduate ones.
Of course, with every essay and every seminar will inevitably come a mountain of reading. For me, some of this reading was unbelievable, illuminating, inspiring, and some others, of course, were complete gibberish. It is hard too, while all your other friends on other courses go to lecture after lecture and lab after lab to just be sat there, reading, day after day. Faced with this predicament I took some steps to safeguard my sanity. I divorced my previous tendency to write reams and reams of notes and forced myself to commit to skimming, scanning, and taking direct and concise notes. This was a great tactic for me, allowing me to understand more of a field in a shorter amount of time. I also tried to combine reading with other things I liked, highlighting articles in pastel colours and taking paring my reading with a pumpkin spice latte. I know these ideas are *basic* but they worked for me. Maybe a different person could read on the treadmill, I don’t know. Point is, doing a masters in history doesn’t have to be a progress montage of different agonising days in the library. Mix it up, study in different places, in different ways and spend that extra time on the readings that inspire you, not the ones that torture you.
To finish, I want to say that the best thing really about a masters is that it’s so much more about you, it’s your research, your ideas, your sources. Seminars and essays are less about decoding other people’s articles and instead they’re asking you, what do you think? You’re rewarded for primary source research in a new way, encouraged to think creatively and outside of the box and tackle questions other historians haven’t asked. In a cringe way, you become a lot more like an actual historian. So start early, write about what you love, let the other people in your classes motivate you, not intimidate you, and most of all enjoy it. You’ll be handing in your dissertation before you know it.
Report abuse