Whenever I tell an older adult that I’m majoring in English they often get a certain look in their eyes, smile at me, and ask, “Oh, and what are you going to do with that degree?” Sure, sometimes it’s genuine curiosity or small talk, but other times it feels more like they’re saying, “What are you going to do with a useless degree like that?” Degrees like English, art, or philosophy tend to get looked down upon because getting a job after graduation tends to be more difficult for us than those with business or computer science degrees. There’s this idea that if a degree doesn’t easily set up a student for a career after graduation then it’s less valuable, but I disagree.

Nobody majoring in English needs to be reminded that we’re less likely than other majors to get a job soon after graduation. We know that. We knew that when we chose our major. In one of my classes when the professor told a student he would be on the job market for about five years, he replied, “I’m an English major. I obviously don’t want a job.” The whole class full of English majors laughed because we could all relate to that. Of course we’d like to make a living, but that’s not why we chose our major.

People don’t major in English because we think, “Hey, this degree will definitely get me a job.” We choose this major because if we’re going to spend thousands of dollars and work our butts off for at least four years then we want to study what we’re really interested in. I never wanted to spend all this time, money, and hard work studying something I don’t care about. I chose this major because I‘m passionate about reading and writing. I chose a degree that doesn’t guarantee a job and that’s okay because I love what I’m studying.

Truthfully, I don’t know what I’m going to do after graduation. A lot of college students don’t know what’s next. I know that I hope to eventually be a bestselling fiction author, but obviously that isn’t going to happen immediately after college, if at all. I’m pretty stressed out by the fact that I don’t know what I want to do and it doesn’t help that people keep asking me about it. Sometimes I have to remind myself that it’s okay that my plans only go as far as graduation. Maybe I’ll get a job at a bookstore or a comic shop. Maybe I’ll try to get a job at my local library. I don’t know what’s in store for me after graduation and there’s nothing wrong with that. What I do know is that I’m getting a degree in something I love.