The department is proud to announce the formation of its advisory board. In recent years, the department has increased its outreach efforts to show students and the public the value of a history degree. Readers of this newsletter know that history is a versatile major. The skills that you learn as historians to conduct deep research and communicate your findings transfer to any profession where you need to explain why things happen through a compelling narrative. In a world that focuses on the news cycle of the day (or hour), historians’ capacity to put things in a broad perspective is desperately needed. How can we demonstrate the value of that training to students and the community at large?
That was the goal of the advisory board. The department called upon ten alumni from a variety of professional fields to become our counselors and ambassadors. Jenny Devine, Josh Holzman, and Sujaya Rajguru undertook legal careers in the government, in private practice, and at a non-profit, respectively. Olivia Mayor and Kelly Schindler have spent their careers in museums and preservation. Sara Awartani finished a Ph.D. after UF and is now a professor at the University of Michigan. Adam Howard did his Ph.D. at UF and now is chief historian at the State Department. Also in Washington is Matt Howland, who used his history education for his career in government, where he now works as a trip lead in the White House. Like so many history majors, Alecia Snelgrove found a calling in teaching history in school. Of course, history is also a great major for business, as AbbVie executive Michael Halpin can attest. You can read their full biographies at the advisory board page.
Advisory board members play a variety of roles in the department as models, mentors, and advocates. The diversity of career paths serves as an example for students, an answer to the eternal question, “what are you going to do with that major?” In the coming months and years, they will also participate in roundtables about professionalization and help individual students who are exploring career options. Perhaps most important, the advisory board can help the department understand what they found valuable about history after they left Keene-Flint, and how we can communicate that message.
With the advisory board, students and faculty alike have new opportunities to connect with alumni and to be inspired by their lives. If you are a history graduate who wants to get involved in the department or just to let us know where your education has taken you, write to us at communications@history.ufl.edu or complete our brief alumni survey.