I always hesitate to tell people I'm an English major because more often than not I will get one of two responses by doing so:

"What are you going to do with that?"

or

"Oh, so you want to be a teacher."

***

I knew I wanted to write from a young age, I've been writing and creating stories every since I knew how. Yet, I didn't know I wanted to be an English major until well into my high school years. For a while, I wanted to be a vet. That was until I figured out that I absolutely SUCK at science. Also, math is a bummer. But I enjoyed writing since day one.

I decided to pursue that writing passion in college through an English major with a writing emphasis. I'm lucky enough to have parents who back me up, who encourage me to pursue my dreams rather than choosing the "practical" college route which would guarantee me a job at the end of my four years of college.

My mom and I started the college search at the beginning of my senior year. I know, later than most kids. I had friends who already knew they wanted to go to Harvard from the day they were born. But not all of us can be Rory Gilmore. My mom and I took a road trip from our home in Colorado, through Nebraska and into Iowa to look at five colleges. It was a trip we both knew we would regret (five schools in one week is an introvert's nightmare), but one we knew was necessary.

Hastings was the first college we toured and I fell in love with it at first sight and the tour we were graciously given only confirmed my adoration. We were even able to speak with one of the English professors, Dr. Antje Anderson, and when I told her that I wanted to write she was more than ecstatic for me.

Unfortunately, the following tour did not go as well.

My mom and I went on a very similar, yet not as graciously-given tour and met with the head English professor just as we had in Hastings. But this man was no Dr. Antje Anderson. When I told him I wanted to be a writer he scoffed and said, "so what do you really want to do?"

My mother and I both sat there dumbfounded. Noticing the hesitation, he followed with, "Well, you know, what do actually want to do? You can't earn money as a writer. You need a real job."

Let me humbly remind you that this man is the head of the English Department. Yikes?

Yikes. But this is not the only time I've had this interaction. Writers make no money. Literature is not essential. English is a useless major.

I've heard it all before and I'm here to tell you that such a statement is simply a fallacy. English is not a useless major. Why? Well, let me say this: literally everybody at any point in their life will need to know how to write. Everybody. Furthermore, everyone will need to know how to write well. Whether it's for research proposals, marketing designs, teaching plans, rhetoric, or entertainment, everyone will have to write sometime in any career. And in order to do so successfully, that composition class you complained about taking freshman year will come in handy.

As for my case, reading will never go out of style and thus, writing for entertainment purposes won't either. Since the dawn of time people have been telling stories. People then shared them, modified them, rewrote them, pulled ideas from them, and from that, literature was formed. Every religion has some form of holy text, every civilization has their own myths and legends, every person has voluntarily sat down to enjoy a book at one point in their life. People have been entertained by stories for millions and millions of years, it is not an art that is going to die. In fact, it's an art that is bound to grow and flourish forever within its limitless reach.

I want to be part of that. I want to be like Shakespeare, Virgil, JK Rowling. I want to write tragedies, comedies, fiction, nonfiction. I want to create universes, characters, lives, dimensions. I want to put love, sadness, anger, and every emotion between into a sentence.

I want to write the sentences that people tattoo onto their bodies, the words that people write down on notebook paper and stick in their wallets. I want to write endings that make peoples' toes curl. I want to thread humanity into strings of letters, words, and sentences. I want to invoke catharsis in the hearts of all my readers and write stories that they will never be able to forget. That's a desire that will never ever go out of style, and that's why I'm an English major.