A quick update on some of the material the Graduate and Early Career Committee (GECC) has been working on recently: 

As I mentioned in my previous post (“Graduate and Early Career Committee: Current and Future Work,” dated February 02, 2011, and available at AHA Today), GECC attempts to create and share information of value to graduate students and early career professionals. One way we do this is through organizing sessions at the annual meeting. While we hope that everyone can take the opportunity to attend the annual meeting, we also strive to present this information in other formats for those who are unable to attend.

The 2011 GECC-sponsored session on careers in history was posted to the AHA's YouTube channel in January. More recently, Perspectives on History featured a panel from the 2010 annual meeting entitled “The Art of the Article.”In this three-part forum, Peter Coclanis, Cathy Kelly, and Elizabeth Shermer share advice on article writing and publishing, the place of articles in one's academic portfolio, and navigating print as well as online publication.

We trust that placing material on the web allows us to reach a broader audience and serve more of our constituency. However, we are open to ideas about how this information is best shared, so please let us know your thoughts in the comments below. Do you prefer video straight from the annual meeting? Or post-meeting write-ups that appear in Perspectives on History? Or is there another way in which we can communicate this material to you? Let us know your thoughts!

Finally, GECC spent much of its spring meeting discussing ways in which to improve the meeting experience for graduate students and early career professionals. Some of these changes are still in the works for the Chicago meeting, and I'll be discussing them in a blog post closer to the event.

Aaron Marrs is the chair of the Graduate and Early Career Committee.