Dear UBC Department of History Class of 2021,
Congratulations on finishing your undergraduate journey at the University of British Columbia!
Completing any degree is no small feat, and to do so during a pandemic, under all the uncertainties you have faced, takes an impressive amount of tenacity and grit. With your undergraduate career now behind you, I hope you have the time to rest and to reflect before traveling the road ahead.
By studying history, you have learned to engage with different ways of seeing the world. The ability to contend with multitudes and hold the world in its complexity and contradictions are skills you have honed throughout your degree, and ones that will carry you into your future endeavours.
By studying history, you have changed your perception of ordinary, everyday things that others take for granted. You learned that history as a discipline is not just a catalogue of facts: it is a search for understanding what facts matter, for finding new facts that have been hidden, and for reinterpreting their significance. Ultimately, history is about our ethical engagement with the world, and ethical engagement is what the world needs now, more than ever before.
Congratulations once again on a job well-done. Whatever you choose to do next, wherever you end up, keep in touch, and know that your peers and professors will be cheering you on.
Dr. John Roosa
Acting Head of Department
Associate Professor of History
