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Congratulations to those students who are receiving their degree results today! Please find below a message from Professor Eleanor Robson, Head of the History Department.
Well, congratulations on your degree result! After all these very, very difficult months, and waiting far longer than one normally would, finally the big day is here. And it’s great to see that the No Detriment policy that UCL introduced across the university has done its work and has been kind to you all. Everybody in the Department has got at least a II.1 and many of you have got Firsts.
I personally don’t know individual results — for me it’s still all anonymised at the point I’m recording this. Because on the day that you get this message, I will be somewhere deep in Wales, far from wifi and far from screens.
It’s been an extraordinarily difficult year for all of us, with the strikes then with Covid, and of course the final year of a degree is always inherently stressful. But you’ve coped remarkably well: you’ve all risen to the challenge. Our four External Examiners at the Exam Board last week were all singing your praises about the amazing work you have done, particularly around your dissertations but also many of the alternative assessment answers that you gave. Many of you really put a lot of time and care and sheer intellectual brilliance into your answers. So our External Examiners were all blown away by the quality of the work that yo produced.
I’m sure you’re beginning to think about what happens next. In fact, you may well feel already that UCL is a bit of distant memory. If you’re going into job, congratulations and good luck! If you’re starting a graduate course, again congratulations and good luck! If you’re still looking, remember that our Careers Service is still available to you for two years after you graduate (ucl.ac.uk/careers). They’re still there for you, and your personal tutor is still around to help you with references, etc.
And if you’re missing us a lot, and you want to come back, our MA programmes are still open for recruitment until the end of August. There’s Ancient History, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, European History, and History — those are the big programmes. And though we haven’t been able to finalise the exact details of face-to-face teaching yet — it’s been really complicated to work out how we teach face-to-face with social distancing — I am very confident that we will be able to offer a lot of face-to-face teaching on our MAs. So if you would like to come back to campus or you would like to learn with us online next year, do go and look on the Department’s home page and sign up.
Even if you’re off to other destinations, do keep in touch, because I am still hoping and intending that, as soon as it is possible to do so, we will hold some big graduation celebrations together on campus, and have the party that we should have been having this September instead.
Thank you all for being marvellous! Do keep in touch with your personal tutor, and with the department. Do join the UCL alumni association. I wish you the very, very best of luck!
Prof Eleanor Robson
Head of UCL History
30 July 2020