If You Want to Go to Grad School, Go to More Seminars

When I first started looking into getting my master’s, it had been more than 13 years since I’d completed my undergraduate, and 8 years since I’d completed my teaching certification program.

I get that some women are worried about feeling “too old” to go back to school, or that it might be “too late” for them.

Every once in a while, those thoughts flash across my mind, too.

But what I’m actually more afraid of??

Is that I just won’t be able to “hack it” anymore.

That it’s been so long since I’ve had to write a paper, pass a test, participate in a discussion, etc…

Which will lead me to be stressed out and behind in an intense academic environment.

And then, this one is more specific – but I personally spend a LOT of time alone.

Aside from the tours and group trips I host?

Or the on-location work I do as a content creator?

I’m often just in my house, at my laptop… typing or recording away.

So there IS the social aspect, too… how will I meet people? Make new friends? Respond to doing group projects?

What I’ve found for myself, is that even just THINKING of all this can be incredibly stressful and overwhelming.

So it’s best to just pick one thing that’s really tangle – that I can actually do, and ‘grab hold of.’

And for this article, that one thing is going to seminars.

If you’re seriously considering going to grad school, go to more seminars now if you can.

Table of Contents

What’s a Seminar?

In the academic world, a seminar or colloquium is usually a 60 to 90-minute presentation where a scholar shares their current, in-progress research.

Think of it like a single session that you would find and attend at a conference.

Instead of a polished lecture from a textbook, it is a behind-the-scenes look at how history is actually being researched and written today.

Usually, the presenter speaks for about 30 to 45 minutes using slides or reading a paper, and the remaining time is opened up for a Q&A discussion with the audience.

To give you an idea of what these actually look like on a university schedule, here are a few examples of the types of topics and titles you might run across:

Material Culture & Everyday Life: “Threads of Memory: Women’s Needlework and Domestic Inventories in 18th-Century New England”

Archival Methods & Marginalia: “Reading in the Margins: What Early Modern Annotations Reveal About Female Literacy” (I wrote a piece about this by the way!)

Social History & Local Communities: “Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Records: Reconstructing Working-Class Neighborhoods Through Probate Court Archives”

Historiography & New Approaches: “Rethinking the Digital Archive: How Machine Learning Is Changing How We Read 19th-Century Newspapers”

Seminars Are the Ultimate “Warm-Up”

When you’ve been out of school for years, your brain gets used to running on real-world time.

For me, this has looked like managing projects, meeting client expectations, hosting events, and attempting to hit all of my deadlines on a daily basis.

If you’ve been working for a few years, especially – you’re always getting things done.

There probably hasn’t been a lot of time to just slow down and think.

Academia works on a totally different frequency.

Academic life moves slowly… digging into tiny details. You’ll spend a lot of time analyzing source material and methodological frameworks.

Trying to jump straight from years in your career directly into writing a formal statement of purpose can be a LOT.

I’ve definitely felt the need to ease back into a formal learning environment, so going to seminars can be a away to do that without putting too much pressure on yourself.

Here’s why being in those seminars helps so much:

1. You Get to Re-Tune Your Ear to Academic Language

Terms like historiography, archival methodology, material culture, or everyday history (Alltagsgeschichte)… they’re all thrown around constantly in graduate programs.

Academic fields shift, and the ways scholars discuss their research evolve over time. So it can feel impossible to keep up with any kind of glossary.

By the way, highly recommend reading A Field Guide to Grad School: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum by by Jessica Calarco.

If you have a Premium Spotify account, you can actually listen to the audiobook version for free, which is what I did.

But you might also have a free copy at your local library (or you can support her and buy the book if you afford it, which is always a great thing to do).

Reading books helps with learning too, of course, but that also has al limit.

Sitting in a room where a scholar presents a working paper gives you something different.

You get to hear how people frame questions live.

You see how historians respond to pushback, how they defend their sources, and how they use academic terms in real conversation.

2. It Is Low-Risk and Zero-Pressure

Public department talks and colloquia don’t come with the stress of worrying about grades.

You are not paying tuition for the talk, nobody is evaluating your performance, and no one is going to quiz you on the reading.

You can literally just walk in, sit in the back row or join a Zoom webinar, and observe.

It gives you a front-row seat to actual graduate-level academic discussions without any expectations on you.

3. You Can Reinvent Yourself For the Day

Identity-wise, there’s also something pretty incredible that happens when you start rebuilding your identity and asserting yourself where your future life will be.

It all becomes more normal to you – like this is just “something you do all the time.”

On one hand, I know that blogs, YouTube channels, and social media (which I’m now a part of) have all contributed to making academic into its own aesthetic.

I’m still torn on whether that’s a good, bad, or neutral thing.

But to write it all off as superficial doesn’t seem quite right either.

The clothes we wear, the way we style our hair, how we choose to adorn ourselves…

I mean, isn’t this the exact kind of thing that historians and archaeologists spend their whole lives studying and wondering?!

They uncover jewelry as artifacts and develop theories about the status and culture of the individual(s) who owned them.

And sociologists… don’t they study what we find beautiful and how certain trends start?

I do find it fascinating that fashion, jewelry, hair care, makeup, etc. are then relegated to the world of the superficial when we’re talking about them now.

Or, could that be because these are all subjects women tend to talk and care about… which makes them seen as more low-brow and less important societally?

But that’s a whole other can of worms we’ll dive into another time. 😉

For now, give yourself permission to plan out your outfit for the seminar if you’re attending one in-person… or even consider the blouse and/or blazer you’ll wear (and how you’ll do your hair, makeup, etc) if you’re attending an online Zoom webinar.

Regarding the latter, I do think it’s a good idea to have your camera on and participate in the chat or on the mic when you have the opportunity.

Remember – the world of academia is small.

You never know who’s there, who’s watching, and who could be a friend or an ally later on.

This is how we make friends and network in academia!

4. It’s an Honest Diagnostic Test of Your Interests

Note that when I write sections like this, I’m writing them to myself as much as I’m writing them to you.

It is easy to romanticize graduate school when you picture quiet libraries, beautiful archives, and stacks of old books.

But actual historical work is very detailed, granular, and hyper-focused on specific historical problems.

Sitting through a 90-minute presentation on 18th-century probate records, domestic inventory lists, or handwritten marginalia in old texts gives you the opportunity to have a real-time check-in.

If you walk out of that room feeling curious, energized, and wanting to look up the sources the speaker mentioned, that’s a sign that you’re on the right track.

That the spark you have is real!!

And if you sit there thinking it is not for you?

You can gain that clarity before spending thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours on grad school applications.

Either way, you get a tangible answer.

Where to Find Academic Webinars and Seminars

One of the best parts about seminars, is that you can learn without being enrolled anywhere.

A huge portion of department talks, guest lectures, and institute series are completely open to the public, both in-person and online.

Here are the best places to start looking:

Local University Event Calendars – Go to the website of the university nearest you, find their History Department (or Humanities Institute), and click on their “Events,” “Colloquia,” or “News” tab. Look for terms like departmental seminar, brown bag lunch series, or visiting scholar lecture.

The American Historical Association (AHA) & Regional Associations – Professional organizations host webinars constantly throughout the year on research, pedagogy, and field trends. Many of these are recorded or open for live Zoom registration. The AHA is specifically for history of course, but there are organizations like this for every field and specialty.

Specialized Research Centers & Archives – Places like the Newberry Library, the Huntington Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, or regional historical societies host virtual research talks year-round. These are fantastic because the speakers are usually sharing work-in-progress straight from the archives.

H-Net (Humanities and Social Sciences Online) – If you want to get granular, check H-Net’s main announcements page. Scholars frequently post calls for audience members and Zoom links for upcoming virtual workshop series across every niche subfield imaginable.

University YouTube Channels – Yes, really! If you want zero friction and total anonymity for your first run, search YouTube for “department of history guest lecture” or look up specific university humanities centers. Many upload full 90-minute seminar recordings with the Q&A included. This is actually how I discovered my first field of interest (ethnomusicology).

Just Show Up (Even If Your Hands Are Shaking)

You do not need to wait until you feel 100% qualified, completely confident, or fully prepared.

In fact, you’ll probably never feel that way.

The most highly-educated and experienced professionals in the world often hold nuanced positions over what they know SO WELL – and they’ll be the first to say that there’s so much they don’t know.

You also don’t need to wait until you know your specialty, or what the topic of your thesis or dissertation will be.

And actually, if you’re having a hard time deciding (hello, fellow multipassionate!)?

This could be just the thing you need to gain some clarity on that.

Or, you may find out that you’ve been confusing personal interest in a topic, with the desire to pursue it full-time academically.

Don’t Let This Stay On Your To-Do List!

Start with YouTube and watch one seminar, all the way through.

This will also be a great exercise for anyone who feels they’ve lost their attention span due to video content and brain rot (be sure to put your phone in the other room!).

Pick ONE upcoming talk this month.

Put it on your calendar.

Plan your outfit, style your hair, make your favorite coffee (or visit a new coffee shop!), and show up.

Whether you sit silently in the very back row of an old lecture hall or log into a Zoom call with your notebook open on your desk, you are actively taking a step toward the future you want.

You are re-acclimating yourself, and building muscle memory for academic activity.

And slowly but surely, it will stop feeling like a scary, closed-off world you are trying to break into.

You’ll sit in the audience on the day of the lecture, you’ll look to your left and your right, and you’ll think, “Wow… I do belong here. I do have what it takes to be an academic. I’m so glad I came.”

See you in the back row.