Why Major in English?

Whenever I’ve told people that I’m majoring in English, they jump to “oh so teaching?” No, not teaching. If I’m being honest, I don’t like kids. No, I chose the English major because my strengths lie with research, analyzing, connecting the dots and writing. I’ve already taken the English capstone course, and we covered a similar question. From that I learned one important lesson: to be an English major is to be moldable. We acquire the basic skills — reading and writing well, research, analyzing, etc. — and then tailor those skills to whatever the job is at hand. All of that while retaining an emphasis on humanity. Meaning, we’re not easily swayed into abandoning empathy and sympathy for others just to get the job done or make a profit. This is a vital skill that is often thrown away in a lot of jobs today, with people trying to get the leg up on others and take advantage of their employees.

While learning those core skills in this day and age, we’ve also learned that “texts” and “works” are no longer just words on a physical page. In the age of the Internet and ever evolving technology, texts have turned into multimodal works such as film, television, video game, graphic novel, podcast, and much more. We’ve learned how to study these texts and their meaning, and if we don’t know much about the medium in which it’s in, how to research it and learn how to interpret it. To be in this major is to learn how to change based off the problem at hand, so that you might better meet the need and fit the mold.