Being an English Major comes with accepting all the questions that every other major gets, but with a harsher tone. “What’re you going to do with your degree”? (Who hasn’t been asked this?) More importantly how quickly most people able to answer it with a quick, “I want to build bridges” or “I want to help sick people” or the always popular business major answer of “Be Jordan Belfort, because who doesn’t like money?”. For English majors, this is a much harder thing to answer because we honestly don’t know what we’re going to be doing with it. Yes, personally I am going to teach and I have my own plan, but even if I wasn’t going to be a teacher I would still be an English Major. I’m not just doing this because I enjoy it, like many people think, I do it because I’m good at it. I don’t mean to brag, but in the words of our dear leader, “I have the best words”.

I’m going to do my best to avoid the questions that everyone else answers in their own “Why I’m an English Major” essays, but some are unavoidable and I’d ask that you please bear with me if what I say sounds just a bit too familiar, as everyone should be able to learn something from this…hopefully.

The first thing is this - almost no one really knows what they’re going to do with their degree. Some majors just have it easier with what they say they’re going to do. For instance, a law major knows they’re going to go work for a law firm and know that they specialize in patent law, but they don’t know exactly what they’re going to do on a day to day basis. If you put an English Major into that same scenario they can tell you exactly what they specialize in, and that they are going to go work at an office in an engineering building, or some other random business, people get confused. They don’t understand what an English Major would ever do in an office building or for an engineering firm, and truthfully, we don’t entirely know either. It’s not that we don’t know what we can do with our degree or what we’re good at, but that we genuinely don’t know what we’ll be doing on a day to day basis. Sure, we know that we will have to transcribe some engineer’s numbers and statistics into a coherent paper so that people actually know what those numbers mean and actually create their report for them, but we don’t know exactly what else we’ll be doing because we can do so much with an English degree. Chances are someone who has studied Linguistics will be able to understand what someone who learned English as a second language is trying to say better than someone who can barely make their own papers discernable from a middle schooler’s writing.

The other thing that we all have to deal with is the good old fashioned question, “Do you ever actually do anything”? or “You don’t have a real major so what are you worried about”? First off, we do more work than you’d think - it’s just not the same staring at textbooks and writing out equations that most people associate with homework. If you see someone sitting in a library with a poetry anthology or any normal sized book with flags on it, chances are that that person is analyzing that book more than a Game of Thrones fanboy theorist would. For instance, look at Robert Francis’ “Silent Poem”,

backroad leafmold stonewall chipmunk
underbrush grapevine woodchuck shadblow

woodsmoke cowbarn honeysuckle woodpile
sawhorse bucksaw outhouse wellsweep

backdoor flagstone bulkhead buttermilk
candlestick ragrug firedog brownbread

hilltop outcrop cowbell buttercup
whetstone thunderstorm pitchfork steeplebush

gristmill millstone cornmeal waterwheel
watercress buckwheat firefly jewelweed

gravestone groundpine windbreak bedrock
weathercock snowfall starlight cockcrow

Admittedly, this still makes almost no sense to me even after writing an entire paper on it. So, just because you average general Englsih students can BS an entire paper off of seven different sources with a topic of your choice. We can’t.

Then, have you ever tried writing a paper with people around? It’s hard and you can’t take a quick break after a problem the way you can with math and science. Those late-night essay crams that an average student has once or twice a month is at least once a week for us. It doesn’t seem like we do homework that often because we don’t do it in front of you.

Finally, yes, a lot of us do go into education, but not because that’s the only thing to do with an English degree, but because we actually care about making students into better people. Math and Science teachers have strict curriculums that they have to stick to in order for students to be able to learn all that they need to before the class is over which leaves little time for personal student-teacher connections to develop. Social Sciences, and English teachers on the other hand can learn about their students in their homework and every day in class; opinions are developed, questions are answered, and students learn how to have GOOD conversations and arguments with each other. I teach not because I’ve “failed” at other things, and this is my only option, but because I believe that teachers need to nurture the growth of our children, because they are the future, and if they aren’t educated on how to communicate effectively we are doomed to a society of people who can’t communicate effectively and only know how to share articles expressing their opinions for them.