By Carly Matheny ’18
Finding a job is hard, but finding a job in the middle of a global pandemic was even harder. I had started searching for a new job in the fall before the COVID lockdown — not that I knew it would happen at the time – and the search became a little more fraught as the news of the quarantine broke.
In the spring, I managed to get a job with Dimex Corporation in the shipping and packaging department, which meant I was in charge of ordering and organizing the packaging used for the daily production schedule. I was in that position for four months before being asked to interview for an office position in the accounting department, which I agreed to. I wasn’t sure what I would have to offer an accounting position since I had taken two linguistics courses to fill my quantitative reasoning credits, and I had no certifications in accounting besides prior work experience in previous jobs. It didn’t surprise me to get the offer because I knew that the company preferred to hire internally first, but what did surprise me was when I sat down with the CFO of the company, and the first thing he asked was about my history major in college.
When people asked me why I decided to major in history and minor in religion, I usually gave a vague answer that I fell into. At the time, it had been the truth. I had started at Marietta College without a major, but the choices I made for my classes within the first year made it clear where my interests actually lay. I’ve come to realize that the real reason is that I like to know what happened, how it happened, and why it happened.
It's a common saying that history is set in stone, and that is true to a certain extent, but being taught how to study history showed me that the more we study, the more we learn new things about events that we thought we already knew everything about. Studying history teaches us how to look at everything from every angle possible, not just the people who originally reported on it, and it teaches us to pay attention to even the most seemingly innocuous details of any recounting of an event. Learning about history teaches us to keep asking questions and to continuously ask the why of everything.
It was these two skills that the CFO who interviewed me was most interested in when he offered me a position in the accounting department. He wanted someone who was detail-oriented and who could investigate. I started as a receivables clerk, which meant I handled the money coming into the company from sales and such, and being able to see the minutiae of the payments and investigate were critical parts of the job. Payments had to be entered by hand and if they were off by even one cent, then none of it could be entered. A large part of the job was also why we were receiving payments and for what.
Almost a year ago, I moved positions in the accounting department and accepted the change to payables, which meant I was now concerned instead with what we were paying out. It wasn’t completely different from the receivables position, requiring attention to detail of money going out and being able to justify why we were paying it. Just a few weeks ago, I was handed four lease contracts that we had on file and asked to find out everything I could about them, including the history of how much we have already paid them and to whom the money was going. Nearly every task in my current job requires that I keep an eye on how our past actions measure up to how we continue to do business in the present day.
When people found out I was studying history and religion, they would ask if I was planning on teaching and would be confused when I said no. They would ask what I planned to do with it if I wasn’t going to teach, and I wouldn’t have an answer. But I can say now that I would use everything I learned by studying history every day after graduating. I majored in history and religion, but I was taught how to think critically about every single piece of information that was presented with in order to make informed decisions.
When I vote, I don’t choose whoever’s ads are the most compelling, but I crack open my laptop and research everything the candidates have ever done or said on issues that I’m concerned with. I open up any of my social media apps or watch the news, and rather than accept the information at face value, I dig deep into it. The media is telling us one thing, but is the truth? Studying history has taught me that there is always one other side to every story, often at least five more sides to a story than the one we see in mainstream media. We have to think and use the skills we learn to understand all the angles of the story we’re being told.
Studying history taught me how to be aware of all the media I consume, even the fictional media. Fiction often reflects reality via the biases of the author. Being aware of the history of authors informs the unspoken themes and messages that they are trying to convey, even to people who would shut off the news in an attempt to hide from reality, for good or bad. Even supporting authors who don’t agree with your personal stances has become more difficult with the ability to investigate the history of the author and what they support.
We learn history as a chain of interconnected stories, unchanging things that happened in the past that we should know about in order to avoid repeating in the future. But studying history and religion taught me the abilities I continue to use every single day whether it is in my job or in my free time, to be able to watch the world and events around me with an informed and critical eye.