Dear STEM major,
I come to you during finals week of the spring 2015 semester. I am currently laying in my bed, watching Netflix and nursing a hangover. On top of all that, I am not the least bit stressed about finals week. How you may ask? Because I'm an English major.
You see, while you slave away trying to calculate differential equations on a reactor, or memorize the functions of the human body, I get to lay in bed. Because my finals were over before finals week.
But that's not the point of this letter. I am not trying to rub in my stress-free finals week life, but rather to explain to you that while it may seem like it during finals week, the English major is not a cake walk. The English major is not easy by any means. It can actually be very hard. I would love to see my chemical engineering roommate attempt to read a novel and write a ten page paper on it in one day. Or even more impressively, NOT read the novel but still find a way to pound out a ten page, A+ paper.
English majors do finals differently. Yes, we still take tests. And yes, they're cumulative. However, instead of memorizing information and regurgitating it onto a scantron, we walk in with a blue book and a prompt and are left to write for two hours. When a STEM major looks at a question on their final, they know that there is one correct answer, whether they know the answer or not. With those odds, a guess has a 25% chance of being right. For an English final, there is no way to BS your way through it. Try writing five thousand words on a topic you know nothing about, and let me know how that goes. And even after all of that, the grade is completely opinion based. I can count on one hand the amount of tests I have had handed back, where I didn't have to go argue my point further during office hours, to receive credit.
On top of those finals, we have term papers. This isn't your typical five paragraph essay. I'm talking about research papers in flawless MLA format that are longer than all of your lab reports combined. In these papers we discuss every novel, author, time period, and more, than you could imagine. They're long and they're tedious.
So if you are thinking about complaining about how “easy" life is for an English major, don't. We put in our time and earn our degrees, just like everyone else.
Sincerely,
Every English major
