It’s a clear and warm night, the stars are shining above me as my friends and I begin our first night of summer together. I sit in my friend’s kitchen waiting for her and the rest of our group to head outside for a night of roasting marshmallows and eating s’mores. Her dad walks into the kitchen, and we’re each greeted with a “Hello,” a “How are you?” and of course, the inevitable “How’s school going? What are you studying?” And so begins the roundtable to answers from my friends and I:

My first friend answers, “Good. I’ve been studying business and art history!”

“That’s great! Business is such a good thing to get into. And how about you?”

“Accounting!” my friend to the right of me answers.

“Good choice! And you?” he asks as he turns to me.

“I’m majoring in English!”

“Oh.” An awkward silence fills the air, then, “And you, my dear? What are you studying?” He moves onto my friend sitting next to me. I ponder whether or not he meant “Oh” in a good or bad way.

“I’m studying business and accounting!”

“You too! That’s great. Making your way up in the business world, eh?”

…Definitely a bad way.

Please know that I am not trying to single out my friend’s dad in this slight bias, as there were many people before and many people after him who have had the same reaction. Surprisingly, I didn’t get the follow-up question from him that most people ask when they learn what I am studying, which is:

“What are you going to do with that?”

This question is more than familiar to many English majors. We’re so used to it by now that it’s become routine. We have a rehearsed answer, depending upon what each of us want to do with English.

Most people assume that studying English won't get us a job, as this comic seems to satirize. Otherwise, they'll assume we want to become teachers, which is true of some of us. However, in my experience, most do not. Others may be interested in jobs people may not have realized studying English can entail, such as editing and publishing, or maybe even a life of academia. Some don’t know what they want to do, which I’m sure many college students can relate to.

That may sound bad, but I am here to tell you that that’s okay. I am here to tell you that being an English major, or any other liberal arts major for that matter, is not necessarily a recipe for disaster; that sometimes studying what you love will not always leave you broke and unemployed. There are many routes one could take as an English major, and I am here to make skeptical people realize that. For example, here are a list of jobs English majors could pursue in their field of study:

• Lawyer
• Teacher
• Librarian
• Editor
• Copywriter
• Professor
• Curator
• Technical Writer
• Marketing Director
• Social Worker
• Journalist

These are only just a few of the many jobs that one could pursue as an English major. As one can see from the list above, English is a versatile field of study. It teaches you to think, write, and speak critically in front of others.

Not only that, but studying English forces you to think globally and to put yourself in the shoes of people from around the world. You learn how to decipher why this writer wrote this work in their time period; what were they trying to convey to their country and to the world, and what impact did they have on those around them.

Learning how to interpret people’s motivations is important in not only reading the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, but in interpreting, for example, a court case. One has to think and read critically in order to understand the matter at hand. You have to dig deeper than the surface, and studying English teaches you that. It teaches you that there is always more, that there is an endless amount of new ideas, and that these new ideas can lead to something great. Whether it be winning a court case or creating a marketing campaign for a new novel, the English major can help you there.

Being English major is therefore not as bad an idea as some may think it is. I think it’s important to remember that English majors aren’t just a bunch of college kids looking to win at Poetry Slam night, or ones that hope to become rich by being a freelance writer (which we all know is a job that’s out the window in this economy), but students who actually want to play an important role in society.

We want to go to law school. We want to document new as well as ancient art pieces that go through museums such as the MOMA. We want to inform the world of what is happening with the endangered animals in Africa, with the war in the Middle East, with the cultural food trends that are spreading throughout the world. We want to edit, market, and publish the next New York Times best selling novel. Hell, we want to write the next New York Times best selling novel. We want to and we can do all this with an English degree. The sooner people start realizing that, the less we’ll have to worry about making a rehearsed speech for every person that asks what we want to do with subject that we love.