It is very well known that English majors get a lot of flack. So much so, that many English majors have lost all pride in their academic choice and are pretty defensive about it. From one writer to another, that kind of ‘tude will only limit you.

So to lift your spirits and remind you how great it is to be an English major; here are some great jobs you can have with an English degrees and famous friends who all have found great success with theirs! Read More »

I ran out of post it notes.

Now to you this may not seem like a moment worth mentioning, but to me this is a monumental deal. You see, back when I was a freshman, fresh faced and eager, I did things like shopping for school supplies. I bought pens, and paper, highlighters and binders, and, most importantly, I bought post it notes. (I’m an organization freak. For my kind, it’s the little things like multi-colored sticky paper that make life worth living, okay?) But these weren’t just any notes. These were the super stack, a 12 pad pack of multicolored 4X4 sticky notes. I was sure they would last me all four years of college.

That was before I started working on my senior thesis.

Thesis projects require note taking. They require page marking. They require a lot of post its. I printed journal article after journal article, photocopied book after book, stuck notes in chapter after chapter. This summer I finished the blue pad. In the past month alone I went through the purple, and this past week I finished the hot pink pad. My post it notes are no more. Seven months before the end of my college career. (I’m a little heartbroken. Don’t judge.)

That alone would be enough to make me reconsider my commitment to this whole “senior thesis” thing, but I assure you I have plenty more reasons. I started this thing back in May. I picked a topic, and wrote out a proposal. Over the summer I started doing some light research, reread the novels I was working with, and marked the important passages.  It didn’t seem all that bad, but this past summer I didn’t have four other courses to worry about. Now I do. Needless to say, things have gotten a bit more complicated. Read More »

As a creative writing major, I’m extremely lucky to have parents who didn’t scoff at getting the arty side of a liberal arts education. My parents are voracious readers who have a high level of respect for the arts, and as a result they can be happy for me, even when my class schedule looks distinctly impractical.

Love in the Novel

Nabokov

Intro to Buddhist Thought

These are the kind of classes my parents put up with throughout my college career, with nary an Econ class to be found among the lot.

Many students feel a lot of pressure, however, to take classes that will turn around into the best profit. They know their parents are dropping some major Benjamins to keep them in a good school, and they want to return the favor by, at the very least, not making their parents go gray worrying that their children will be living in a box on the street. So they take Econ and finance classes. They try to become good little doctors and lawyers and I-bankers.

But most of the people I know taking that path aren’t particularly happy doing it. Read More »