My alumni magazine arrived today, and it got me thinking about old times. Or, as Shakespeare put it, for "my salad days, when I was green in judgment." For the love of all that is holy, people, don't choose English as your major unless you are prepared to suffer. There's a reason there are more English majors at your local fast food joint than any other type of college graduate. There's a reason Garrison Keillor makes jokes about English majors working menial jobs and diagramming sentences just to freshen up their skill set. It's because English departments attract the kind of people who are dreamers, who are so right brained they can't manage to coordinate their socks, and who are too absorbed in their Victorian novel to pay the heating bill. I know this, of course, because I was one.

Me: My name is Karen, and I'm an English major.

Group: (together) Hello Karen!

You know how English Departments market themselves? This is a paraphrase of one piece of propaganda I actually encountered. "Graduates of the English program have found lucrative careers in a variety of fields. They thrive in the world of business, publishing, and even zoology." This, of course, translates to "receptionist, paper boy, and guy who scoops up porcupine scat." That's because unless you're going into teaching and are planning on doing graduate work right after college, there's not much that potential employers feel you are qualified to do with an English major. It doesn't help that at a lot of major universities, an English major is a common default degree. You can pretty much graduate with this major even if you don't speak a word of the language. At my school, those of us in the English department worked really, really hard. We had a rigorous course of study—reading massive tomes in a short amount of time, writing massive essays in an even shorter time. I've taken whole classes dedicated to etymology. I've read everything Dostoevsky ever wrote. And yet, when I submit my resume to an employer, it's sitting right there next to the one from Joe Imbecile from Major University, who became an English major by default, and who thinks terminal commas are something you'd need to see an oncologist about. Not that Joe Imbecile would know what oncology means. He'd probably ask for "ontology" by accident, and end up in the secret philosophy wing of the local hospital.

So please, dear friends, be careful if you're thinking about selecting English as your major. I don't regret my English major, because it's helped me as a writer and an editor. I just wish to high heaven that before I swore fealty to the English Department, someone had tossed a caveat or two my way. From time to time, I toy with the idea of traveling around the country, doing some kind of old-time revival show to warn young people about the dangers of an ill-considered English major. "Smoke your illicit substances if you must," I'd say, "but an English major is something you don't want to get mixed up in unless you have a Very Good Reason." If you can't think of a Very Good Reason within the first five seconds of rumination, you should probably go into botany or nuclear science instead and just leave the terminal comma to us. We may die from it after all. But if not from that, then definitely from exposure, because the power company has turned off our heat again.

Tags: academia