In high school, English was that one subject that everyone was told they needed but no one actually cared about. They cheated on vocabulary tests, muddled their way through papers, and lived for movie day. If you were that one kid who practically lived for English class, you were a tad bit odd. In college, you're the exact definition of odd. Biology and Computer Science majors spend their days and nights studying away, hyped up on all kinds of caffeine, while we seem to sit by and play around on our laptops. Little do they know our major is just as difficult as theirs and, truth be told, we're not taking the "easy way out." These are the struggles that every English major faces as told by our good ol' friends at Dunder Mifflin.
1. If our laptop crashes, we're done for.
Our entire lives are saved on our laptop, from short stories for creative writing class to analytical analyses for others. Not to mention the fact that a majority of our not-yet-known-to-the-public-or-even-our-moms novels are kept safely stored away on our computer's hard drive. If all of that is lost, we'll go into a lost-writing-depression that might take weeks to get over.
2. The English Department is small, which means you end up seeing the same people over and over.
Biology and Psychology majors have a plethora of classes, professors, and to an extent students, to interact with. The English Department has 10 professors, all of whom you know on a first-name basis, and about 30 kids who know more about you than your parents.
3. We have to deal with being told we're taking the easy way out at least 3,241,564 times a day.
Sure, we don't have to study for 1,000 years or do intense research projects, but we have to balance what our professors want us to write and what our souls want us to write. Being given "constructive" criticism 24/7 can be hard to handle at times, and it's just as soul crushing to us as getting a 26 on a Bio test is to you.
4. Being in a writing slump doesn't just affect our personal writing.
When your entire major is based solely on your ability to produce creative work, and you're in the middle of the biggest writing slump of your life, passing with anything above a D seems nearly impossible.
5. When something goes wrong, you can't just backspace it all the way to the beginning.
In writing, it's easy to fix your mistakes. Just click 'backspace' a couple of times and voila! You've deleted every mistake. You can take a few days off, walk around campus, and wait for inspiration to hit you. But you can't do that with life, and sometimes you desperately wish you could.
6. Creative Writing classes are the definition of 'Hell.'
It's hard to give even your friends some of your writings to look at, and it's a completely different thing to give them to a classroom full of strangers. Workshops and classes built for creative writing can make it seem as if your writing is awful and maybe you should switch to accounting so that no one ever criticizes your work again... And then you realize you'll have to do math.
7. Math, Science, and anything that is "black and white" doesn't make sense to us.
Math and Science in high school were difficult. In college? They're downright awful. We can't compute numbers at a high rate of speed, or even fully understand why exactly Mitochondria are important. All we know is that they're the powerhouse of the cell, and that sometimes in math little letters get thrown in there to confuse the hell out of us.
8. A majority of our time is spent trying to jump start our creativity.
What does throwing a watermelon off the top of a building accomplish, you ask? Well... actually nothing, but it was a fun thing to do and afterwards I knew how to describe the sound of a watermelon exploding, so. I'd say it was pretty successful.
9. We're not all hippies, and we hate that stereotype.
Sure, some of us have a lot of funky piercings and seemingly liberal perspectives, but that doesn't make us hippies. We're just very in touch with the world around us and how people work. That's how we write our characters, by observing people, and through observation we realize that everyone is the same and everyone deserves to be loved.
10. Relating to other majors on a personal level is e x t r e m e l y difficult.
While we can have entire conversations about literature and how to write a novel, students in other majors couldn't care less about those things. They're more concerned about politics and finding the square roots of quadraticals (are those even real?). It's hard for us to understand and relate to a lot of what they think is common knowledge.
