Pst. Hey, you. Yeah, you—reader. I have something clichéd and important to tell you: follow your Moss Hart and Kurt Vonnegut (you see those puns there?)—make the switch to English.
The Major Less Traveled By
Everyone has dreams and aspirations of what they want to be. During my childhood years, I wanted to be a scientist, but once I hit high school, I wanted to be a psychologist. When I arrived at college, I was set on the psychology degree: I took my first psychology course the first semester of my freshman year in college, and being a psychologist immediately waned after that. After my first semester as a psychology major, I decided to switch to art and graphic design. I went through a semester with that, utterly full of contempt with my decision—art and graphic design is too niche for me, and I was not enjoying it to say the least.
Having hit an inescapable roadblock, full of stifled self-discovery and creativity, I switched to computer science on the premise of money and job security, and did that for the two years that followed (from the beginning of my sophomore year to the end of my junior year). At the end of my junior year, though, despondency set in: I discovered that I was not going to graduate on time. My computer science advisor did an awful job at preparing me for the road to graduation—I was advising myself, really. Always having had a convivial and ardent relationship with English, I changed my major one final time to, you guessed it, English. After my experiences in college, I realized that I just wanted to walk away with a degree in something that I was passionate in—writing.
The Plight of English Majors
I am certain many of you readers are expecting some sort of heartwarming story of how a relative introduced me to works like Moby-Dick or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; however, my story is less melodramatic. Growing up, specifically in my early teen years, I read many “complicated” literary works on my own from writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare, William Blake, and a few others. It was because of these writers that I started to write short stories and poetry in my early years, with the hopes of being published one day.
Many of the works I read made me curious about an English degree, but I was always discouraged from pursuing it. Trying to figure myself out, I went on a “soul search” (if you will), aiming to accurately decipher what it is my heart and “soul” really wanted to do. Through my early schooling years, I won many awards on written proficiency, was asked to be a public spokesman for my high school, helped many students with their papers, and excelled exceptionally in all of my English classes; apparently, I was good with English.
Since I had been writing since my early teen years, it only made sense to major in English, and to stop thinking that money was the key to happiness. Because English at my university is such a short degree, and I had taken some college courses during my high school years, I talked to the Chair of the English Department at my university and he said completing an English degree was feasible in two semesters. With that level of confidence and assurance from the Chair of the English Department, I plunged head first into the pool of words.
The Best Decision I’ve Ever Made (& Why)
In the brief time I have been an English major, I have had the time of my life. I am now at the end of my college years, and believe I made one of the greatest, yet most maudlin choices of my life: being an English major. I say “greatest" choice because it has allowed me to express myself in a way I never thought possible; it has sumptuously opened up so many doors to my mind, and introduced me to some of the greatest writers I have never known. I was always interested in English, but had never delved too deep into it.
I say "most maudlin" choice because it was difficult switching from computer science, a profession that has (almost) guaranteed eminence, to English, an unpromising exertion. With the inherent creative nature of English though, I never felt incredulous or nervous to open my mouth and offer an opinion or interpretation in class discussions—English, in my opinion, never has a “right” or “wrong” answer, and that contemplation is compelling.
For example: in a Survey of American Literature course I took, the ability to propose a differing opinion from the professor when it came to interpreting works was always available. In that class, we analyzed works by Allen Ginsberg, William Dean Howells, Langston Hughes, Kate Chopin, Robert Frost, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ralph Ellison, Henry James and many, many others (I could go on for days). Because English is an interpretive medium, the professor (and students) willingly disagreed with each other without tantalizing or irascibly mocking each other. For this reason, I took fervent interest in the engaging discourse of English—I liked talking about things interpretively, and being able to have intelligible conversations in a logical way about things that might be illogical. Being interested in all things English (from the writing to the language to the words [etymology] to the literature), I found insouciant reprieve in its open-endedness.
Sometimes “The Best Decision” is the Hardest
But, as I mentioned before, a somber tone incessantly followed me after I changed my major.
Had I stuck with the computer science degree, I could have had a plethora of careers lined up for me with little to no effort: front-end or back-end development, systems analytics, software engineering, database management—the list could, quite literally, be endless. Nevertheless, I changed my major because I figured I would be unhappy with many of those job titles, and it would have taken me far too long to get into the field. Unfortunately, the many computer science professors I had did an awful job at teaching, and an innumerable amount of the concepts I learned were not sticking with me due to the way I was being taught.
