As a student pursuing a bachelor’s in English writing I am intimately aware of all the good and bad that comes with the study: from being bullied by all my S.T.E.M. major friends to learning how to communicate my thoughts eloquently and succinctly– as well as how to insert as many big words as possible into my writing.
While English majors don’t receive as much judgment as others (sorry art majors), we still hear plenty about how useless our major is in the real world. And while it would be easy to talk about the various fields we can enter, such as journalism, teaching, grant writing and so on, I prefer the defense an alumnus that studied English explained it to me: “I went back to school to study English when I realized that I would rather be happy than rich.”
So you might be asking why I would choose a major with low job prospects that are generally scoffed at. I selected English writing as my major not because it was practical, but because of a sense of passion for the subject! If you like reading three different books from the 19th century every week, writing ten-page papers on the symbolism of the color yellow in the wallpaper or simply love the idea of there not technically being any wrong answers, English might be the major for you as well.
While everybody seems to think that English is one of the easiest majors offered, there is a lot that goes unnoticed by outsiders looking in. At times, we as English majors have absurd amounts of readings that continue to get piled on, we have five papers due at any given moment in the semester and then we have workshops in which our peers get to dissect everything that we had to say in those papers.
However, we also learn some amazing skills throughout our studies: learning how to write essays on books that we hardly skimmed, learning to find quotes out of context that fit whatever argument we are trying to make and learning how to justify studying English to everyone we talk to.
The question then remains: is it worth undertaking 120 credits and potentially thousands of dollars of debt all to pursue a passion project? The answer to that question remains to be seen. For now, I simply get to continue dredging through “Pride and Prejudice” and submitting papers at 11:59 on the due date while telling others about how much I love what I study!
