What my English Major Means to Me

“Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.”  -Salman Rushdie

I study words: how to read them, how to understand them, how to use them. As a senior I feel like I know a lot about a lot while also knowing nothing at all. I’m graduating in four months! Has my life really changed these four years?

But of course it has, I remind myself. I may have the same haircut and still look like I’m sixteen and not be the all-knowing adult woman I thought I’d be, but I’m not the same person I was when my parents left me in my dorm room those years ago. No more safety; no more four-year security. And when I’m done in four months, what will I have to show for it? My diploma will declare the English degree, and to some that may mean nothing. But to me it’s significant.

There are many essays and articles on “the defense of the English major” and the like (mostly written by English majors, as one would guess), statistics about how English majors actually fare quite well in the job market, thank you very much, and, of course, many naysayers in real life whose eyes glaze over when you tell them you’re an English major, and then respond, “Oh, that’s nice. What do you want to do…teach?”

But I’m not here to give you the facts about how well English majors are doing in the job market, or justify why “I’m just as smart as you!” in a room full of STEM people. I’m an English major in my last semester. I’m not insecure about it now, nor have I ever really been. But studying English has brought me more joy than many other things in college and in my life.

Of course, the question of “what do you want to do with your life?” does keep me up at night, but not much more than it does for many of my other non-English major friends. That’s just part of being 22.

I came to college as an Exploration major, or Ohio State’s fancy way of saying “undecided.” I stayed undecided for a full three semesters, taking all sorts of mismatched classes together like anthropology, women’s and gender studies, international politics, statistics, environmental science, and Arabic.

Sometimes I wish I would’ve just hurried the hell up and declared the English major at the very beginning instead of tiptoeing around it like it was something I was trying to avoid. I could’ve graduated early or something. But what’s the fun in that? I’m grateful that I paused first. Tara Westover writes in her memoir Educated that “I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create.”

Even within the English major, I’ve had many opportunities to think critically across other disciplines. This semester, I’m taking a class called “Environmental Literature and Media: Livability and Justice in the Anthropocene,” which asks questions about how the humanities can address socioeconomic and cultural factors affected by climate change. Another one, called “Rhetoric and Social Action,” discusses various persuasive appeals and rhetorical purposes employed by public health activism. The breadth of my academic time, and what that has done for me, has been incredibly generous.

My English concentration, which is Writing, Rhetoric, and Literacy, deals a lot with these rhetorical contexts, as well as other topics in philosophy of writing or speech, professional writing and editing skills for the workplace, and linguistics. The WRL concentration is full of students of varied interests such as literary publishing, magazine writing, freelance writing, marketing and communications, law, and business. But it’s also just, like, enjoyable.

WRL is also a very unique concentration — while many English majors in different universities study only literature (nothing wrong with that, of course), my English major is particularly relevant to cross-disciplinary questions and critical thinking for disseminating information in this current age of “information overload.”

Essayist Scott Russell Sanders remarks on this by saying, “Feeling overwhelmed by data, random information the flotsam and jetsam of mass culture, we relish the spectacle of a single consciousness making sense of a portion of the chaos . . . a haven for the private, idiosyncratic voice in an era of anonymous babble.”

But I also particularly love the “fun” classes: the ones that don’t seem like they’d have much relevance to the job market, at least not overtly like my other classes. Some of my favorites have been Pre-1800 British Literature, Pre-Civil War American Literature, Fiction Writing, Nonfiction Writing, Literary Publishing, and, in London, British Fantasy Literature and Contemporary British Literature. Especially in London, as I wrote for a scholarship essay last year:

“Specific to my own experience, I hope that placing my studies in a different environment will increase the skills I aim to improve: global awareness, adaptability, and independence. In the British Fantasy Writing class I will take, I look forward to reading medieval tales and Arthurian romance in order to fully understand other epics of the modern era. Literature is so much more than escaping to another world. Literature tells greater truths about the history, identities, ideologies, and aspirations of the people who both read and write them. Literature maps the human experience, and reading them at different points in life or in different places can drastically change what they mean. As a kid, my favorite fantasies were Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter; I am lucky to have grown up in the Harry Potter generation. We embody a post-9/11 mentality that internalizes the lessons of equality, tolerance, diversity, and compassion. I hope that reading my favorite books of all time in the places that inspired them will be one of my most rewarding academic and personal experiences.”

And I was right; reading my favorite books in the places that inspired them was one of my most rewarding academic and personal experiences. Sixteenth century French writer Michel de Montaigne wrote that “every man has within himself the entire human condition.” That mentality makes me want to get out of bed every day and explore that topic through the literary ways I know best.

But second semester senior year can be scary, and sometimes I don’t want to get out of bed because I seize up when thinking about the next. So I cling to my English major and the storied halls of academia and dusty bookshelves of the C-Bus literary scene, wishing I could crawl under a blanket fort with a flashlight and not think about the ever-elusive “future.”

But if I didn’t have to pay for it, I’d do it all over again. I’d grab my freshman self by the shoulders and say, this is you. Don’t second guess yourself. College is hard and life is hard but you’ll find yourself in these walls. And then you’ll have to leave, but that’s ok. Because you’ll take these words you love so much and spread them elsewhere. And that’s all I can do. I’ll grab my books in my arms and march into the next.