I sat with Hugh Egan first; even though I do not have a class with him this semester, he still was able to take the time to sit with me and talk about life – his door is almost always open for students. I asked him first how he became an English major. He said, “Well, first I was a psychology major because I wanted to be like one of my older brothers and I thought he was so cool. But for my freshman year, I also had to take one English course and I found that my psychology courses didn’t ‘excite me’ as much as what I was learning in my English class. So I decided to become an English major – which my other older brother was, too.” Oh, Hugh, little do you know that you are so cool with or without your brothers’ guidance.
“Why did you choose to become a professor?” I asked.
“Well, it didn’t necessarily happen the way you would expect it to. I decided to go to grad school and get a PhD because I wanted a pure English education – I didn’t want to learn about English and Education at the same time, even though the idea of getting a PhD is to become a professor. So, when I went to get the PhD, there were no education courses in the way. I think the idea of it was that along the way I would pick up on the idea of conducting a class.” So that’s why all of the course here at Ithaca are discussion based!
“That’s so weird,” I replied, “So, what do you tell your advisees who are English majors that don’t want to be teachers and professors? How do you explain to them that they could still be anything they want to be?”
“Each year, about 30 students graduate as English majors; 1 or 2 will go to grad school and about 4 or 5 will go to school to become teachers, leaving about 23 students out in the work force. Being an English major is good in the sense that it doesn’t directly prepare you for a job, but it does teach you the skills employers are looking for: speaking, writing, analyzing, critiquing, etc. Our majors go to a whole bunch of different fields of work and it will take about two years after graduating for them to get settled into a job they really like. And around that time we send out a survey asking what could and should be worked on and changed. But almost everyone says that they wouldn’t change a thing about the major. They suggest that the major was very helpful in preparing them for the job they are in – even though in class they may not have spoken about it.”
“Wow, that’s really reassuring – coming from alums.” I said. Even though I felt really excited about my career choice talking with Hugh, I am still not sure if you, my dear reader, are completely sold on this idea. So, let’s continue on.
Jumping from Hugh’s office down the hallway to Derek Adams’s office, I spoke to him about the idea of English majors, too. When asked how he came to be an English major, Derek said, “Wow, that’s a long story. Basically, I was taking an English class with this professor who was an a** of a human being, who failed me and almost the rest of the class for no reason whatsoever. At one point he told me ‘You will never amount to anything in this field and you will not benefit it in anyway’. But then, I took another class – because, you know, I can’t let one professor ruin the field for me – and that class I loved. So I decided to become an English major and sort of decided then that I wanted to be a teacher – in order to balance the scale for students who ever encounter a terrible one like I had. I don’t think of myself as a great teacher” I just want the record to show that all three of the professors I talked with are great teachers, and while I understand that ‘perfect’ is not a real thing, these guys are truly great professors and people, “I like to think of myself as a competent professor.”
“So, what do you say to people who think that the English major automatically means teacher?”
He sighed, “Well, I understand where they are coming from: they are only thinking of how the business major has a business industry; how health majors have a health industry. The English major does not have a specific ‘industry’. But the English major plays a very important role of gluing all of those institutions together and reminding the people in the industries to be empathetic. In our courses, we teach you guys how to analyze and to critique and most importantly – but not always explicitly – how to empathize with characters and people. And the people who learn a specific set of skills now are not going to really need those skills 40 to 50 years from now because their field with be evolving and changing over that time. English majors are taught to adept and learn quickly. English majors learn to learn.”
Does that make you change your mind about the English major dear reader? No, not yet? Alright, let’s move on to Dan Breen. He couldn’t be found in his office – which is understandable. English professors are also attending conferences all over the country about the specific interests and concentrations they have in the field and also have families to care and tend for. So I emailed him:
“English was the one subject in which as students we could have pretty wide-ranging conversations yet still be taken seriously by the professors. I took courses that studied literature in relation to gender, race, nationality, different forms and politics, and the instructors always made it clear that we didn’t have to limit the discussion to what it was that they found interesting. Literature was a framework through which to understand varieties of different thinking about a lot of really crucial problems and questions. I became a professor because I was more interested in the content of the literature courses and the way in which they encouraged us to all to ask larger questions: ‘what is the difference, fundamentally, between history and poetry?’; ‘How does our experience of each kind of writing create ethical demands with which we need to engage?’ And I know that most of my advisees don’t want to be teachers, but I think the challenge for most students is that they generally have no idea what they want to do after they graduate, and many of them feel paralyzed by this. I think as advisors, the best thing we can do is get students thinking about what they like about English and how that might relate to specific fields.” And you are doing a fine job, Dan.
Now have I sold you on the idea that English majors don’t always become teachers?