As I work through my senior year as an English major in college, I’m coming to realize that for whatever reason, people in other disciplines, departments, and workforces simply do not understand my program. This realization has been dawning on me slowly for almost four years now, but this year it’s becoming clearer and clearer as I start getting more questions about what I will be doing after I graduate. The questions are painfully repetitive: “Oh, an English major? What are you going to do with that?” “Wow, so you get to like, sit around and read books all day? That sounds so relaxing…”. I could go on.

So what goes on inside an English department? What do English students do all the time? As a lover of my field, I’m here to tell you three of the most valuable things you’ll learn as an English major.

1. How to analyze the written word (arguably) better than any other major.

In an English degree, you will spend four entire years rigorously reading all types of literature, from classic novels to famous speeches to particularly notable news articles, all the way down to blogs and Tweets — and you are not just reading for content. English majors learn rhetorical strategies like the backs of their hands. What makes language work? What kind of language do groups of people respond to most strongly, and why?

Give an English major any copy of a particularly successful speech, and within a few readings, that student will be able to tell you exactly why it worked so well, and how to replicate that rhetorical strategy when writing a speech or appeal of your own. English majors are known for being excellent writers for their mastery of language, and this is why we excel as lawyers, politicians, speechwriters.

2. How to be the best communicators at your university.

Communicating is a distinct skill that most English majors possess instinctively. English classes are literally built on communication. When it boils down to it, the only valuable way for professors to evaluate you as an English student is to gauge how well you can communicate. Were your ideas presented clearly? Did you think deeply about the issues and present your ideas intelligently, both in person at class meetings and in your written papers? The quality of your writing will reflect the quality of your critical thinking, and it is critical thinking that English majors live and breathe (and are graded on).

So why does this even matter? Here’s just one example: often, large corporations are full of brilliant scientists like engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists — but these people often cannot communicate as efficiently or effectively as an English major can. As an English major, your degree (and more importantly, your skill in communication) has built-in versatility. After four years of training as a communicator, you can adapt to any discipline and transfer your writing and speaking skills to whatever field you find yourself in. This chameleon-like quality is especially valuable in today’s workforce when there is an overload of very specialized STEM majors flooding the job market.

This skill perfectly prepares us for careers in PR, Communications Direction, social work, and journalism.

3. How to understand politics, history, and philosophy — and how these things are represented in the larger culture as art.

In my department, we often joke that English majors are not just English majors — we might as well be mini-History majors, Political Science majors, and Philosophy majors. This is because the literature we read in the English curriculum is so deeply rooted in all of these subjects. How can you understand Candide without first understanding what was going on in Enlightenment-era France?

So what’s an English major to do? If you want to understand the literature, you have to understand the context, whether it be historical, political, or philosophical (although in many cases, it’s all three). For this reason, English majors are some of the most well-informed, well-rounded students. We pick up historical, artistic, philosophical, and political information here, there, and everywhere as we study literature from all eras throughout our college career.

Furthermore, what many people don’t understand about literature is that it is largely not written and studied as entertainment. Literature almost always has a larger purpose than that. Authors like Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, and almost every other author you’ve ever heard of were using their literature as a way of commenting on the current events of their time. If you’re just reading these books for their plot events alone, very few of them would be satisfying, or even make sense, for that matter (I’m looking at you, Virgina Woolf).

Understanding that literature has important political as well as artistic qualities prepares English students well for careers as museum directors, policy advisers, publishers, editors, TV and film creators, and more.

All being said, what people don’t understand about an English degree is that unlike some other programs, English students are not taught to memorize facts and spit them back to professors. We are not taught to be robotic drones who pore over flashcards and diagrams. We are taught to analyze. We learn how to be an active participant in conversations around us. We learn the art of language: how to craft it, and how to dismantle it. We learn how everyone around us thinks and speaks. We learn to read again: not just the words, but the intent behind them. We learn to be critical thinkers first, foremost, and always.