Within the deep brown, wood-paneled walls of Harris 108, Northwestern students and history professors sat at elegant tables to enjoy pizza, salad and conversation at the history department’s faculty and undergraduate lunch Wednesday.
Attendees spent the hour chatting with students and professors, learning what the history department has to offer — both inside and outside of the classroom.
Professors roamed the room, sitting down at different tables to introduce themselves to students and engage them in personal conversations. Students had the opportunity to learn about how to get involved in research through faculty mentorship or programs like the History Senior Thesis Seminar.
Weinberg senior Jiayan Luo said he appreciates that the history department professors are so open to connection. He added that events like the lunch or the popular “Cakes and Classes” add to the department’s appeal.
At “Cakes and Classes,” history faculty members present cakes decorated to represent a class they will be teaching the following quarter. The faculty lunch may not have had any cake, but it offered the same opportunity for students to engage with the history department.
“I think events like this are very important, and not just for the good food,” said history Prof. Stefan Ionescu. “I think this is a really great opportunity to engage with students and meet students from other departments.”
Not all students in attendance were history majors. Communication sophomore Max Outcalt attended the lunch because he enjoys history and wanted to get to know the faculty, he said.
Many students and professors at the lunch emphasized that students don’t have to dedicate their whole careers to history for a class in the department to be a rewarding endeavor.
“Even if you are not planning a career as a historian, I think a history major or minor will help you in very different professional fields,” Ionescu said. “It allows you to develop some skills like critical thinking, close analysis of text, working with broad materials and sources … These are really useful skills later on for professional life.”
History Prof. Benjamin Frommer encouraged students to not wait until their senior year to explore history.
“I think it’s really important early on in college to take — and Northwestern allows this — a bunch of different courses and different disciplines in different departments,” Frommer said.
He also wants students to know that history at NU isn’t about memorizing dates and events, like it may have been in high school courses.
“In fact I would argue that all of our history courses are about understanding people, whether in their own time or in relationship to the present,” he said.
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