When I meet someone, the question that I am usually asked is, "What's your major?" When I respond, with "English Literature" I usually get "What are you going to do with that?" in disgust. Am I offending people with my major? I don't understand. When older people respond in a false good-natured tone as they say " that's a very good major," I am hopeless. Clearly, they do not understand the importance of my major which explains why I am talked down to like a child in a candy store that is being patted on the head and ogled at.
Basically, I don't need anyone's validation. I have entered texts that span virtually all periods of history from subjective and artistic viewpoints. I have an invaluable amount of knowledge in the treasure chest of my mind. Just like how people relish in political jokes, science jokes and math jokes, I find enjoyment in literary puns , character analyses and book jokes. Yes, I am a plain English literature major without a minor in technical fields. No, I will not use my youth as an excuse to pursue a major with a clear career path.
I often laugh at my own literary jokes without sharing them with others because I don't think that they are socially acceptable. I guess that I share the same outsider status as the authors who chose to be writers instead of physicians. In fact, Edgar Allan Poe was thought of as a failure by his contemporaries because he chose to be a poet instead of a man of reason.
Well, at least family dinners, parent meetings and college meet and greets will always be exciting .It's fun to anticipate and compare the forms that the "major question" will take for different occasions.
In regards to the question, "What are you going to do with it?," I will tell you dear reader. The skills that I have honed from writing approximately three dozen papers can be used in marketing, business administration, book clubs, book tours, reporting, broadcast journalism, interpretations of laws, political writings, speeches, presentations, policies, newsletters, teaching and verbal communication at the office level. Hey, I don't think that the list is half bad. In fact, this broad list is fulfilling. Even if I am left as destitute as Herman Melville, I take pride in my cavernous field of study. When I write, I try to express all of the thoughts from my soul. In my opinion, writing and reading are religions that should be practiced at least once a week. This should have been my response after a family member asked me where my degree was going to take me.
Does the value of a job lie in the salary that it yields? What happened to going to college just to learn? What happened to the advice that we should do what we love? Is being a scholar just for the sake of being a scholar foolish? Are these goals outdated; do they represent a bygone era? Are they representative of an era before the twenty-first century? They might be representative of an era before the technological explosion of the twenty-first century and The Great Recession.
My education belongs to me, so whatever I want to utilize it for should be accepted by the public. I believe that passion leads to monetary success, not the other way around. We need to be conscious of the implications behind casual questions that are related to college majors. We need to encourage and believe in each other. Too many students, especially in this economy, suffer from doubt; let's help to bolster the screws in our individual ships instead of unscrewing them. Let's try to find the beauty in each major, because a proper college education is interdisciplinary.
