When I tell people I'm an English major, people usually just ask me if I plan on teaching, but when I say that I'm not, everyone seems to always have the same confused look on their face. They can't possibly imagine any other career for an English major to have. What's funny is that I actually literally can't be an English teacher with my major because I'm not an English Language Arts major or an English Education major, I'm just an English major. That's perfectly fine with me though, because I have no desire whatsoever to teach English. Perhaps you, like many others, are wondering what the purpose of an English degree is if I have no intention of being a teacher.

When I first decided to be an English major, I had every intention of going to law school after graduation. The three most common college majors to precede law school are English, history, and political science. My two favorite majors out of the three were English and history, but I believed that English was a more applicable than history if I decided that I didn't actually want to go to law school after all since I knew I didn't want to be a historian or a history teacher. Besides, English is the #1 undergraduate major for law school students.

I guess it's a good thing that I chose English because as the years have gone by, I've just felt less and less sure about going to law school. Maybe you're thinking that I made a terrible mistake then. What could you possibly do as an English major if you don't want to be a teacher or a lawyer? Well, take a look at this chart, and you may be surprised how many options English majors have.

So while education definitely takes up a huge portion of the jobs that English majors have, it's not the only option. English majors can work in nearly every field, so the stereotype that all English majors are going to be starving artists, writing poetry, and working as a barista, is far from the truth. You see, the biggest problem that English majors face is not the lack of career options, but the overwhelming abundance of them. It's honestly pretty daunting to look at all the career paths that I can pursue. Personally, I'd really love to go into journalism or publishing. You're probably wondering why I'm not a journalism major then, right? The answer is simple, I like that being an English major makes me a well-rounded intellectual.

As an English major, the skills you learn in college are no dependent on technology or the market. The literature that I study as an English major teaches me about the world as a whole. I learn important critical thinking skills every day while learning to write intelligibly and beautifully. Emma Watson, who earned her degree in English at Brown, once said, " I could never really imagine myself doing one thing, and I'm pretty sure that I'll end up doing four or five different things. I want to be a Renaissance woman. I want to paint, and I want to write, and I want to act, and I want to just do everything," which pretty much the goals of every English major.

I chose English because I have such a wide range of interests, and English allows me to pursue them all. Being an English major also gives me the skills to understand and explain the world. According to the Yale English major page, "Major tech companies, including Google, actively pursue English majors and others from the humanities who can explain not just how technology works but what it means. "

When you major in English, you're learning about every subject because you get to read work about all kinds of subjects. As an English major, I've learned so much about history, philosophy, science, religion, politics, psychology, economics, and art. You can bet that an English major will have had to read at least one book or essay about any given subject. I once had a professor tell me that, "literature is the window into the world," and that it allows you to learn about anything you choose.

There's nothing wrong with being an English major. Just because I spend my time reading Victorian prose and writing essays instead of calculating equations day and night, it doesn't mean that I'm not going to be successful. I'm working just as hard as STEM majors, so please stop telling me that my major is a joke. It's time we start seeing the value in a liberal arts education again.