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Over the years our graduates entered a bewildering variety of careers, from television production to teaching, and from librarianship to management. Cultural History really does prepare its students for all possible walks of life! Here is a selection of career destinations for recent graduates:

• Arts administration and coordination
• Marketing in the music business and graphic design
• Management in the retail and human resources sectors
• Investment advisor
• TV presenter
• Florist
• Pub and brewery management
• Publications assistant and project leader for national and local charities
• Local government administration
• Library assistant
• Genealogist
• Language teaching and TEFL (in Germany, Poland, Japan and elsewhere)
• Positions in the caring professions: nursing, support work, social work, youth work
• Postman

Other Cultural History graduates have moved on to further or higher education:

• PhDs in Cultural History and related disciplines (including Geography and Sociology)
• masters degrees in Museum Studies and Cultural Services Management
• postgraduate diplomas in journalism, fine arts, library studies, social work, European policy, law and management, nursing
• postgraduate training in information technology and computing
• the PGCE teaching qualification

Here, Marius Kwint describes his experience of Cultural History at Aberdeen:

The Cultural History course first presented itself as an opportunity in 1987, during a rather bleak phase in both my own career as a student, and that of Aberdeen University. It was probably not a coincidence that a new interdisciplinary honours course should be offered at the same time as several small, specialist humanities departments were being closed under a the latest round of Thatcherite cuts. However, this course seemed an answer to my reluctance fully to embrace my current options of Geography (where my performance had been mediocre) and History of Art. My flatmate, whom I had been pestering with my doubts, described the new course as 'manna from heaven', and he was right. I had greatly enjoyed History of Art, but wanted to understand more of the ideas and social conditions that had helped shape paintings, buildings or designed objects. Thanks to the flexibility of the course, my co-students, some from the sciences, were equally able to develop the interests that had brought them to the doors of Cultural History. There were only six of us, receiving some very generous tuition ratios. Topics were usually based on the research interests of the staff, with the result that interest and enthusiasm were high, and finals results were unusually strong. The staff seemed to enjoy the enterprise too. One of them later said to me that Cultural History 'kept them sane' throughout the political difficulties that were ensnaring the University. We certainly developed a unique team spirit, fostered by ritual post-seminar visits to the Machar and some memorable parties hosted by tutors.

Having gained an inadequate but still sought-after British Academy grant to pursue doctoral research in the History Faculty at Oxford University, I initially found it hard to adjust to the change of scale and style involved in coming to a big elite university. Nevertheless, after a faltering start and much support from my partner, my supervisors and my college, Magdalen, I eventually carved out a niche for myself in the form of a thesis on circus in eighteenth-century London. This gave scope to my interdisciplinary ambitions, although writing any doctoral thesis remains a profound challenge that sobers all who take it up. From there I became something of an academic jack-of-all-trades: something for which my undergraduate experience had equipped me, and which was just as well given the unstable condition of our sector. My first job was teaching Media with Cultural Studies at Southampton Institute, tackling such topics as the homoerotic gaze in Arnold Schwartzenegger movies. For me this proved a gratifying education in mass teaching methods and helping students from a variety of academic backgrounds. Unfortunately, however, the Institute was beset by preposterous scandals about academic and financial standards that regularly appeared in the national press, and conditions on the ground appeared unsustainable. I left Southampton for a luxurious two-year Senior Research Fellowship attached to the postgraduate programme in the History of Design that was run jointly by the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal College of Art in London. There I worked on the history of souvenir, and organized and published a conference on the wider relationship of objects with memory ('Material Memories: Design and Evocation' [Oxford: Berg, 1999]). This episode was mostly a pleasure, although it was accompanied by a further loss of political innocence.

Now I have managed to get back to Oxford, although not quite to the college oases of public perception, since we occupy a brutalist office block next to the bus station, amid the pollution and seediness that also characterises the city. I would probably be earning much more, more securely, if I had left education at 16. But my duties are chiefly delightful and hardly onerous. Our students are, as yet, all postgraduates: bright, imaginative, cosmopolitan and stimulating. I learn a lot from them while trying to guide them in formulating their findings. Many of them seem to appreciate my efforts. This satisfaction, and the knowledge that there have been, and may yet be, other ways of understanding and organizing the world, I can reasonably say I owe to Cultural History at Aberdeen.