Interview with Elise Brenton
Elise studies Modern and Contemporary History and likes to focus particularly on social, gender and cultural history. She puts her interest in history partly down to living close to London and its museums, and partly down to avidly watching Horrible Histories as a child.
Elise’s top tips:
Be specific in your essays and have a clear direction.
Find balance and link your point back to the topic.
Have good time management and start essays earlier.
MIEKE: Today I'm joined by Elise who is a history undergraduate, and she will be discussing her essay on Kindertransport and how it can be applied to the current refugee crisis. Can you tell me what your piece of writing about and what interested you in the topic?
ELISE: My piece of writing is about Kindertransport and why it should or shouldn’t be translated into policy around refugee rescue efforts and general policy towards people coming into this country that had to flee. I previously did a literature review, and I looked at lots of different articles about whether we should be using this. And that's where I got the idea to look at that as a topic for the briefing paper, which is intended to inform those who will be making these policies of historical events, what we should be learning from them, and then providing recommendation.
MIEKE: How do you go about planning, researching, and drafting your writing?
ELISE: A lot of the time, you won't cover the same topics twice when you're doing an assessed piece of work. But this time, the literature review was supposed to inform your thinking. So, I did have a head start with that. I think I like found an initial topic, and then read a bit around the subject to inform myself first. But a lot of the reading I really couldn’t do until I knew where it was going to go. I had a foundation of reading and then as it developed, I could see what more I needed to support different pieces of evidence.
MIEKE: Did you have to do something before this, like another bit of assessment for this and then work off that one to create the essay?
ELISE: The literature review was just weighing up different articles against each other. And mine happened to be all to do with Kindertransport and how it relates to today. So, a couple were talking about how we can learn from it. And one was talking about how we deal with it today, discussing Kindertransport and memory, so they're really useful. And one of the articles is where I got the idea, because it was talking about how it was suggested as a blueprint for our responses today. And it's talking about it in quite a positive light, but the person who was writing the article was highlighting why we can't translate it directly. So, I use that in the article, especially because of recent events, and government policy has been fairly controversial. It’s a constructive way to think about it.
MIEKE: Thank you. Have you got any books or articles that you found useful?
ELISE: Because it’s relating past events to current events, a lot of it is contemporary. But I think there were quite a few useful journals, I think the most useful articles were about what we can learn from the Kindertransport, and how that can inform medical professionals. And that was quite interesting because it was about the other side of things like what helped people when they got here, mixing history with another subject area.
MIEKE: This is a slightly different type of essay, so what challenges did you face while writing the essay? And how did you overcome them?
ELISE: I think with a lot of the things I write I often start much too broad and have to whittle it down and really find a clear direction of where it's going. Because with this one, I thought I was going to maybe relate it to government policy, but I realised that’s not really the aim of it. Because I had to consider UN guidelines, it wouldn’t just be applying to one country. This sounds broader, but it helps focus on what the real aim as the paper is. So, I think it is something that I would do next time.
MIEKE: So, would you in terms of advice you would give to someone else writing this, would you say, try and focus it on something a bit more specific?
ELISE: Yeah, definitely. The more specific you can go without limiting yourself is probably best, especially in history, because it can get broad really quickly. I think making it specific was the main challenge. And remembering, if you're dealing with something quite contemporary, always remember to link it back to the history side of that was a challenge, to find a balance.
MIEKE: What have you gained from writing your essay?
ELISE: One thing that I really liked about doing it this way, is because it's not an essay, it's a briefing paper. It wasn’t so academic, there wasn’t so much jargon. And I think that's something that you don't have to necessarily have in essays either, I think it was a quite nice exercise to write things a lot clearer and try different style because that if you can't use it directly, it can enhance you're writing a little bit, and then you're trying different styles.
MIEKE: Did you learn anything that you didn't know about the refugee crisis? Or are you pretty informed on that already?
ELISE: Definitely. I knew it was large scale, it’s going on in almost every continent. I didn't realise exactly the numbers of it, and exactly how many children were involved, because that was obviously a central part of the essay, because children are priority for evacuation. But also, they make up a lot of the people who are not part of any scheme, they're just being evacuated themselves. So obviously, the priority for families to get them out. But also, the struggles they face afterwards, it's not just getting to a different place. It's then finding housing, integrating, finding jobs, asylum seeking, things like that, which is something I I never knew the full extent of. They don’t just flee, there are several challenges when you move to a new place. Also considering what’s next, when do you plan to go home? Is this your life now? Things that those who have never faced that just wouldn’t know if they didn’t look into it.
MIEKE: Absolutely, you wouldn’t know unless you’d dealt with it.
ELISE: Yeah. Because I initially aimed to have my audience be the British government considering what's been going on recently with their ideas to deal with the refugee crisis. It felt quite like good to be informing someone in government about these things, because it feels like they really should have that knowledge of what it's like before they make policy.
MIEKE: You've already touched on this a little bit, but can you tell me a bit more about what a briefing paper aims to achieve? You said that your audience was the British government. Can you tell me more about that?
ELISE: Yeah, so I think this is the first time I've ever really done it. You’re informing either government or maybe UN officials, a lot of the courses based on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. But a briefing paper is basically informing politicians and people involved in government about in this case, historical events, to inform them briefly, and maybe give some recommendations at the end on how they should inform policy now.
MIEKE: Looking back at your second year, what would be your key advice for students in the history department? There's obviously a bit of a jump from first year to second year. Do you have any advice for students in your history department specifically?
ELISE: Time management is important. It's still something I've not quite mastered. Honing your focus down because that's going to help you as well. Pacing yourself would be my main recommendation, it’s quite hard to do. But if you start earlier, then you're not worrying so much about it later, when a lot of things are due on the same date.
MIEKE: I think that's key advice for any student to be fair! Thank you so much for doing this, Elise.