7 Strengths of an English Major
Imagine you’re about to finish high school or a gap year and you’ve been accepted at a college or university of your choice - yay! What an accomplishment! The question on your mind, and that everyone will be asking you, is: what are you going to study?
You freeze.
What do you want to study? What will lead you to a “good” job? What kinds of jobs are out there? Oh no! You don’t know. How are you supposed to figure it out when you haven’t even gotten there yet?
You freeze again.
Does this sound familiar? Even if that wasn’t your own experience, you probably know someone who had this moment.
There are a ton of choices when you go to college, and as a college student, you’re expected to figure out what you like and what you are good at fairly quickly to “get your stuff together” and graduate in 4-5 years.
Many people will say that the best and most logical course of action is to get a degree with immediate and easy-to-see job paths such as engineering, nursing, accounting, or pre-law/pre-med. For some students this makes sense! If you already know what you are good at and what you like, it makes a whole lot of sense to go right to a more direct career-driven degree.
But for those of us who just love a couple of things and want room to explore, that’s not always the best answer. Sometimes we need a little more flexibility than a nursing degree offers. English is an incredibly viable option for those who want to explore their interests while still making themselves employable.
Liberal Arts degrees are a hot topic right now because they are less structured toward a direct career path. English has often been picked on as an “easy” degree, but, as someone with two of them, I can tell you that’s not true.
Below are the top valuable skills that English majors acquire and hone during their degrees. Do those skills look familiar? That’s because they’re in almost every job ad you’ve ever seen.
English majors write. And they write some more. And then more after that. Chances are, if you are taking a full course load of English classes, you might end the semester submitting 30-40 pages of polished writing for a large portion of your grade in most or all classes. This means that by the time you have done this for 6+ semesters you are pretty darn good at sounding professional and appropriate in your writing. (You may or may not encounter the longer more intensive writing during your first year.)
You learn to speak the speak and walk the walk of an academic, and sometimes creative, writer. This is valuable in the professional world where the primary contact is via email. Figuring out how to complete all of these papers and projects without sounding exactly the same each time also means that you have developed a knack for getting creative and organizing your writing appropriately. You will be right in your element when you get into a workplace that’s project-based and you have to send 50 emails a day.
If you are shy of public speaking now, you probably won’t be after you get done with an English degree. At least not to the extent you were when you started. English majors have many presentations throughout their degree - some creative and some research-based. Sometimes they are brief (around 2 minutes) or sometimes they are longer (around 15-20 minutes). If you are a go-getter and the opportunity is there, you might even present at conferences! You might also have to put together group presentation at some point.
Any way you go, you will speak in front of people. This translates well outside of college for several reasons: you have to interview to get a job, many jobs require talking to people you don’t know, and even if you are not in a client/customer-facing position you will still work with other people. Being able to talk to people means that you are more likely to be able to work well on a team and collaborate with others, which is a desirable trait (often a requirement) in many companies and careers.
English majors think. Hard. For long periods of time. In writing. How do you think we get all those papers done? You will learn new things on a daily basis about researching, writing, and things you never thought you would know. English majors can look at a problem and dig in to see what’s at the root. I did my undergraduate degree in English, with a concentration in Literature, and for almost every single paper I wrote, I had to find an aspect of a piece of literature, explain it, describe why it’s important, and how it relates to everything else we learned in class.
Other concentrations are similar in that they all find a problem, explain it, and relate it to the larger discussion. You have to be able to think critically about what the problems are and what the larger conversation is in order to place yourself in that realm. This is beneficial outside of college because you can think about problems in the workplace and see the global picture as well as the situation at hand.
Creative problem solving goes hand-in-hand with critical thinking, because English majors learn how to identify and become a part of larger conversations. When you’re thinking critically about the conversation, you really have to be able to carve out a small niche for yourself to join that discussion. And, if you were thinking that you were the only one who fell madly in love with that classic novel written in the early 1900s, you are DEAD WRONG. People spend their whole lives writing about “classics,” so when you want to write about them for a class, you really have to get creative to figure out how to make your own ideas different from every other scholar who loves that book as much as you do.
The good (and bad?) news is that this happens all the time. So what is an English major to do? Pull up your researching pants and get to work thinking about how you can get creative with your writing. Employers need this skill, and often desire or require it in job ads, because if you can creatively solve problems, you can promote growth and help solve existing problems. It’s also important for upcoming fields not well established yet because you excel at making things work in new and creative ways.
What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever looked up? (I don’t know if I actually want to know, by the way.) You will probably top it when you are an English major because most times you are able to write about something that interests you. Fashion in Victorian England? I know a researcher who is an expert. Dead bodies or trash and their portrayals in literature? I know researchers who study those things, too.
Not only is it incredibly gratifying to find a relevant article you can use in your end of semester papers, it’s also building an invaluable skill for post-graduation. We live in a world where information is literally at our fingertips almost anywhere at almost any time. About anything you can think of. It’s not enough to know some stuff when you go into a career anymore. You have to know how to quickly find information when you don’t know things. And when you spend the last semester of college trying to figure out how to write about a book no one has ever heard of, I’d say you’re probably pretty good at finding resources.
These are skills that many college majors offer, but are really critical to English majors. On average, if you’re taking a full load of 4-5 classes, you will have 4-5 end of term papers to write that are all due the last 3 weeks of class. Yes, you can do it. But, that doesn’t come easily if you don’t use some planning and multi-tasking skills. You have to manage your time at least reasonably because you will probably be writing 4- 5 papers on 4-5 topics that are all between 10-20 pages long. And that needs to be good, polished writing when you turn it in.
So, you have to prioritize and plan your time well to succeed. This is also imperative in life after college both personally and in the workplace. Things get complicated after college! It’s harder to hang out with your friends when they are on different work schedules than you and you all have significant others of some sort. These are also all skills you must have in any job, especially if you want to get into a career where you work pretty independently.
Last, but certainly not least, English majors are flexible! We get to choose much of our college curriculum for ourselves, and if two classes you want to take are at the same time, you have to pick one. We learn early on to make decisions and think ahead. Your favorite professor might be teaching your dream class at the same time as a class you are required to take - what do you do?
You might have to choose between two classes, but one of them sounds slightly less terrible than the other. You (hopefully with the help of an advisor) have to learn that flexibility and decision-making because sometimes specialty classes only run once every 2-3 years.
This skill is an absolute essential in most jobs outside of college, too. Employers need someone who can flex outside of their job descriptions sometimes (within reason) to lend a hand or for someone to take ownership of a project. English majors excel here because we’ve been taking that ownership for years.
While these are highly valuable skills, English is not the perfect major for everyone.
It does require intense writing and researching. Some of the careers English majors develop into also take a little longer to grow.
You need to work on doing something with your skills while you’re still in college. This might mean an internship, a part-time job, or an immersive learning class. With as competitive as the job market is these days, you do need to think about how to make yourself marketable in these types of ways. You can also consider pairing your English degree with another major or minor to really set your skills apart.
Word to the wise: you probably won’t land your dream job immediately following your degree. That’s okay! No one really has a “dream job” as their first job out of college! (If you did/do, please let me know how you got there! I would love to hear about it.) But, the skills you will develop during an English degree will be invaluable in growing into a successful long-term career.
I’d love to hear about your experiences! How has your English degree helped you? How has it challenged you? What would you tell incoming students who are considering it?