Look, we all know college is hard. There’s no beating around the bush about that. Everyone suffers and it’s unavoidable to suffer. All majors are hard because college is hard. We can all pretend like we are having a blast and these are the best years of our lives, but college is hard. That’s the secret about which college majors are the difficult ones: they all are. Being an English major isn’t easier than the next major.
It’s not that being an English major is the most rigorous major you can choose, but it’s definitely not the easiest. No majors should be classified as easy. One person should not be allowed to decipher what majors are easy or hard unless you have a degree and have gone to school for every major possible. How am I supposed to know how difficult an event management major is when I’m not taking those classes? You can’t judge something when you have never experienced it.
Yes, as an English major I make jokes at my own expense, but it is because it’s my OWN expense. Only I can make jokes about how I’m going to be living in my parent’s basement for years to come. If the joke comes from someone who’s a math major, for instance, it can come off as offensive and it usually does come off as offensive. Even if it’s from friends the playful jokes can hurt.
It’s hard being an English major. Not because of the coursework or the class schedule, but because of all the shit we get from other majors. Not all of us want to become English teachers and we’ve heard of the joke about us never getting a real job and never making any money. We know these jokes are real concerns that we should be worried about and we are. We know job options after college are hard to find and that the list of jobs for English majors is pretty small. We don’t need to be reminded that our major might not help us out later in life. We worry about that constantly! Some people just want this degree to teach English, become an editor, or even just to write whatever we want. People’s personal choices are personal for a reason. If their decision isn’t hurting you in any way, what reasoning do you have to critique their choices?
It’s like if you used a fork to eat soup. That’s just not the right situation for the utensil. It wouldn’t work. That’s like putting a science major in an English major’s coursework. They wouldn’t be used to writing essays, poems, and short stories. Then, they have to workshop them and by workshop I mean hear feedback publicly from that class. Then, they have to change everything they have written and keep repeating this process until they are absolutely sick of their own writing.
Let’s be real: college sucks. It’s a lot of work and effort, but, hopefully, in the end, it will be worth it. Let’s not make it harder on each other.
