Every finals period I find myself having to write papers on papers, wondering what it would be like to do problem sets or just study for a test instead. I turn in one paper and find myself thinking, “Only 25 pages left to write until summer…” As if that were no big deal.
Then, the other night, I was up around 1 a.m. working on a twelve-pager, a research paper based on one of the novels we had read in the class. I was looking through the novel, and one of my friends asked me if I was really working on my paper, or just reading for fun. He had just assumed the book I was looking at couldn’t possibly be a textbook for one of my classes. And then I realized, yes, I was still awake and had several pages left to write still, and yes, this was the third paper I had written that week. However, I was getting to write a paper about one of my new favorite novels, a novel I literally could not put down when it was assigned to me weeks before.
Being an English major is not exactly easy. It is a lot of reading and a lot of writing. I have pulled more than my fair share of all nighters and unreasonably late nights memorizing Shakespeare quotations and researching different visual interpretations of Frankenstein. And, of course, it is not necessarily the most practical of majors.
Plenty of English majors are very successful, but it’s not as if there is a set path. The first question people usually ask me, just like any other liberal arts major, is, of course, “Oh, and what are you planning on doing with that?” There are about a million different directions an English major could take, and no career I have been specifically training for since I got to UVA.
At the same time, though, even as I stay up late reading the last 200 pages of a book or freaking out because I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get a job, I still can’t help but love what I do. Because I love being an English major.
I love going through the syllabus at the beginning of each semester and getting excited when I see books on there I’ve always wanted to read. I love that I can sit in my bed reading novels, and it’s completely justified because it’s homework. I love that the most advanced classes basically involve sitting around and discussing all the books we’re reading, and how much those discussions always seem to push my understanding of the text to a whole new level. Or how I’ve taken way more classes than I need to actually take for my major because I just can’t stop signing up for all these awesome classes I see on Lou’s List. And I love that I can read a book and understand more than just the plot, but instead understand it for how the normative marriage narrative is being twisted or the implications of the Christ-type figure.
I know I complain about all of the work that I always have to do, and sometimes, I wouldn’t mind just going to bed at 2 a.m. instead of finishing that book for class the next morning. But at the end of the day, I’m so thankful that I’m an English major, and that I love what I do so much.
