What Do You Do With An English Major?

I was interviewing for a kick-butt personal assistant position this week, and the fabulous marketing director (who was a firecracker in a 5-foot body) asked, “Why would you want to work here? It’s business and marketing; you’re an English major.” To which I replied, “Business and marketing are all about effective communication to targeted demographics; English teaches people how to effectively communicate through writing to different audiences, be they your peers, your professor, or campus journals.”

This is not the popular answer for what us English types are good for. We are touted as the holders of the most useless major of all time. (Of our more famous critics, Avenue Q and Stephan Colbert are my favorites.) And to some degree, I get it. It’s hard to make an argument for literary analysis being just as useful as engineering, law, and medicine. It’s not impossible, but it’s tough. An argument that stays neatly on the rails of pragmatism is this: we know how to write.

I don’t know how it is that English departments landed the task of teaching students how to write, but it’s no coincidence Writing Centers across universities are filled with English grad students. Where are the Composition and Rhetoric departments? English. I’ve taken classes in 14 different disciplines, but my English classes are the ones where anyone talks about thesis statements, topic sentences, argumentative structure.

So we know how to write; how do we turn that into a marketable skill?  Get experience with writing. I applied for marketing internships around UW-Madison, and landed one at the Wisconsin Union Theater. I use my writing skills for press releases, blog articles, and editing advertisement copy.

Writing skills came in really handy when I worked at the Department of Information Technology Help Desk (which is a fancy way of saying I answered computer questions). I can describe complex solutions to difficult computer problems in ways that a 90-year-old Art History professor can follow. The DoIT Help Desk also has a huge knowledge base, and on my breaks I would submit feedback on how our articles could be even more user friendly.

Lastly, I’m a Writing Fellow. I tutor students from all majors about how to effectively structure and execute arguments in papers about anything from the reproductive system of a gadfly to how the footnotes in T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland contain red herrings.

So we’re not useless. We’ve got skills. The path to using them may not be the most linear in the world, but there’s a place for us in the realm of useful employment. The fact that we can recite Shakespeare, Eliot, and Hemingway on command? That’s a bonus.