When I first started college as a freshman English major, I was terrified.
Terrified that I would be reading and writing from the moment I woke up in the morning until the moment I fell asleep at night. I was scared that it would all be too much to handle. Coming in with this mentality, you can only imagine the heart palpitations I had experienced after my professor assigned my first ten-page paper. Ten pages? Goodbye, five paragraph essay. Hello, sleepless nights. I honestly didn’t even know how to go about writing a paper of that length. How does one fill up ten pages about one topic?
Today, two weeks away from my senior year of college, I have the same question. How does one fill up ten pages about one topic? It’s funny how I was once so afraid of being able to reach the page requirement. Now, I am genuinely concerned that ten pages just simply will not do. How am I supposed to fully, completely, and effectively fill ten pages with one topic and still try to get my point across? It’s become a different type of challenge. A challenge that, as a passionate English major, I have accepted.
So, at one point in time, I was afraid my years at college would just consist of me reading and writing until I needed to add bifocals to my eye prescription. One day this may be true, but for now my reading journey has shaped my career as a student.
The books I have been assigned have sparked my interest in a way that I can now identify myself to a certain genre. Through class conversation and writing assignments, I have trained my mind to think a certain way, to observe something that someone else (a non-English major) might have missed.
Now my only fear is that my dreams will be in iambic pentameter, follow some other sort of rhyme scheme or even be part of some Jane Austen inspired plot, acted out by the people in my life. I also laugh at really corny jokes like the one you saw before you started to read this.
Choosing to be an English major is one of the best, most creative, and self-rewarding paths I have ever followed.
To all of my fellow English majors out there, may your margins be one inch, may your format be MLA, and may your page length requirement be a ten-page minimum.
