By Carl Grevel
Way back in 2017, as a first-year student, I first joined the anthropology society. In my second year, I was the secretary of the society. In 2019 I embarked on a year abroad to find myself, though I got lost on the way to Thailand and ended up in the American Deep South (That’s another article). This year I am acting as president of the society.
The society has been unbelievably welcoming and the experiences I had as a fresher in the society encouraged me to be involved at the committee level.
The anthropology society has been one of the many highlights of my time here at the University of Kent. The society has been unbelievably welcoming and the experiences I had as a fresher in the society encouraged me to be involved at the committee level. For example, during my first year, the society took us all on a trip to Oxford to explore the city as well as the Ashmolean and the Pitt Rivers museums. On top of this, staying at a youth hostel with a bunch of your new anthropology friends for a couple of nights is always bound to result in amusing memories.
Speaking of trips
I have since helped organise a trip to the Max Plank Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig Germany, where some of the most cutting edge research is currently taking place in everything from comparative cultural psychology to evolutionary genetics. The following year I took part in a trip to Burgos in Spain (more of this in Lara Fisher’s article).
Socials
The society is an important addition to the modest anthropology student’s life. It is always finding novel ways to get you drunk. The society runs pub discussions, quizzes, film nights, fancy dress parties, pub crawls and bar crawls, games nights and trips abroad. For those of us that aren’t really buying into English drinking culture, we also plan to run cafe discussions where teetotalling is not only acceptable but encouraged. (I must note that drinking is not a prerequisite for fun at the quizzes, film nights and parties).
The society is an important addition to the modest anthropology student’s life.
Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we are expecting to run socials at the beginning of the year either online (in the form of quizzes) or outside where the risk of catching anything is greatly decreased. One of the best parts of the society are the friends you make and so we will strive to create an environment where we (the committee) can safely get to know our new members.
The future is bright!
As a committee, we have plans to provide a platform for anthropology lecturers at our university to talk about their careers: how they got started, the challenges they faced, the next steps available to you be it in academia or elsewhere. It can be scary having to think about our choices after graduation and we have plans to shine the light on avenues you might not have thought of.
A personal note
You should definitely take advantage of what our society can offer you. Being involved in the society has allowed me to see places in the world I might otherwise have never seen, to make better friends that I never thought possible before coming to Kent and to get the experience of being on an academic society committee. I look forward to the year to come.
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