Why Being An English Major Is Actually The Hardest

My parents always pushed me to succeed. “Study hard,” they would say, closing the door behind them as they left me to my rhetoric worksheets and book of short stories. While I enjoyed my other subjects, English was always my favorite. I was that kid at recess hidden under the slide with a Nancy Drew book. So, it should have come as no surprise to my parents when I told them I wanted to be an English major. “Really!” they gawked, “But how will you get a job?” In the end, I chose paper, pencil, and books over the hallowed stethoscope and gavel. Shocker.

I entered my major with a vision of old books and coffee shops. “This will be a walk in the park,” I thought, and I settled down for what I thought would be the breeziest semester yet.

I hate to break it to you. Being an English major. Is. Freaking. Hard. You don’t just get to nestle under wool blankets with a copy of Jane Eyre in one hand and a mug of Earl Grey in the other. Instead, you get to read a lot of things you like and more things you don’t. You get to trudge through Old English and decipher German poetry. You get to write a whole bunch and realize that your writing is actually not that good (yet). Being an English major means a myriad of papers, several long nights, no sleep, and lots and lots of coffee.

Scared yet?

Here’s why being an English major is actually the hardest.

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1. We read so much we might as well live at the library. English majors have a ton of reading, and not all of it is as glitzy as Gatsby. We go back to the basics –Ovid, Chaucer, and Shakespeare, infamous writers with notoriously difficult writing. If I manage to stay awake through Macbeth, then I’m certainly nodding off during Vatz’s The Rhetorical Situation for Rhetoric and the third chapter of Book in Society for History of Text Technologies. Which I would have to read all on the same day. Yay.

http://www.bustle.com/articles/125697-8-things-that-happen-to-your-body-when-youre-hungover

2. We don’t dissect mice brains –we dissect literature. Sure, we get to read some cool stuff like The Sound and the Fury, Pride and Prejudice, and Patti Smith’s Just Kids. Our work doesn’t end there, however. English majors are meticulously molded to think critically and reach beyond what we see on paper. This is the cornerstone of our study. It requires actually doing the readings, engaging in discussion, and thinking really, really hard about an already subjective topic. Let’s put it this way –critical thinking is not an easy skill to master.

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3. We have so many projects, we’re practically always under construction. I’m not just talking about papers here (which there are more than plenty of in this major). I’m talking about rhetorical responses, discussion questions, novel maps, literary analyses, viral campaigns, website designs, print projects, and –well, you get it.

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 4. We walk the precarious line between black and white. English is such a subjective topic, just as meaning is in itself subjective. This doesn’t stop us, however. We seek to succeed despite subjectivity –the subjectivity of our peers, the subjectivity of our professors, and the subjectivity of a subject that is largely founded on the skill of imagination.

As I launch into my final semester in the major, I can’t help but wonder what my life would have looked like if I had chosen a calculator instead of books. I’m not sure I would have the same passion and drive for this life. Being an English major is hard, but it’s definitely worth it.

Don’t worry. It’s not too late to change your major.

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