Last night we kicked off a new speakers series: “There and Back Again: Grad Tales.” We’re inviting back some former REL majors, who have graduated and gone on to some interesting careers. Coz if you think that the study of religion is all about being religious, then you’ve likely never thought it might be a great preparation for being a high school teacher, a lawyer, a doctor, or maybe even starting your own business. Sure, some of them went on to grad school in the study of religion but you’d be surprised to learn all of the other careers they’ve also entered.

“Grad Tales” will therefore tackle misconceptions about what you can do with an REL degree in particular and with a humanities degree in general — just as will our new initiative to interview other grads and post it on our Vimeo site, talking about their time in REL, the skills they acquired, and how they now think those skills apply to their careers.

So we kicked off this new speakers series with Prof. Merinda Simmons asking some questions of Kim Davis (B.A. 2003), who has also been blogging on our grad site (here and here). About 35 undergraduate students and several profs (and a couple other recent grads too) attended. Some great questions were asked and we hope everyone left feeling a little better about possibly not having life, the universe, and everything already figured out at 19.

Keep your eyes peeled for the next in this series — it may be sooner than you think.