The first question I was asked when I decided to be an English major was, “So you’re gonna be a teacher?” Absolutely not. But no one seems to understand that. The general public just assumes that anyone getting an English degree is going to either be a teacher or a writer. So many people, including English majors, have no idea what an English degree really means or what you can do with it.
I want to backtrack a little and tell you about my struggle in finding a degree program that was right for me. When I was in high school, I thought I wanted to be a teacher. I wanted to inspire kids to do the best they could, and I wanted to end the stigma that surrounded people who like to read. So I enrolled in USI as an English major, intending to add a teaching license to it in the future. Before I even decided on classes to take, really, before I even graduated high school, I decided that if I was going to be a teacher, I wanted it to be math. So when I started my freshman year, I was a math major intending to teach high school students. This quickly backfired in my face when I realized that I didn’t have the background from lower education to succeed in higher education math classes. So I changed my major again. I chose computers. Not only computers, but computer tech. I wanted to be a programmer, even though I had no idea how to do any of it. I failed out of my first and only computer class. So I went back to getting an English degree, this time with an emphasis in creative writing. I’d always loved writing and wanted to see how I could pursue it as a career. After just a couple of creative writing classes, I realized that my ego was much too fragile to pursue writing as my only career. The constant criticism and feeling like I could never write something that someone else would like kept me from writing anything I liked. So I switched my emphasis to rhetoric and writing. My advisor told me I would have a much easier time getting into graduate school to pursue my current dream of being an editor (and there was also the fact that I didn’t have to take foreign language classes anymore!).
Even through switching my major many times, I still get the same question when I tell people that I’m an English major. Everyone always thinks I want to teach, or will be teaching, or should teach because hey! what else can I do with a seemingly useless degree. Even my parents made me believe that I was in a dead end major and that, unless I became a teacher, I would never be successful. The reality of being an English major is, even though people think that there isn’t much you can do with an English degree, there are so many possibilities that it was hard for me to decide what I really wanted to try and do. So for all you English majors out there who think they can only become a teacher or a writer, don’t give up hope. Go talk to career services at your school or just do a quick google search and see what you come up with. I decided to pursue editing because back when all my friends and I wrote, I was always the one asked to look it over and make sure there were no mistakes before they showed it to others. There’s also a whole slew of other careers you can choose to pursue – including legal careers, technical communications, advertising, public relations, and business.
Find out what’s out there, and then go out and be proud to be an English major! Be proud of the part of you that loves the language and all of the crazy reading and rules that accompany the title of English major.
