By: Jasmine Hernandez
On a regular day at campus, you will find me running from the Music Building with pitches and rhythms playing in my head, to then walk into Brownson Building and prepare myself for a class discussion on how the formalist theory of literary criticism can compare to that of the historicism theory. Now why would I do that? Well, when you major in English Literature and minor in Music, alongside being a part of seven clubs having to do with both topics, it happens quite often.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been given the weird, I have three heads, look when I say what my Bachelor degree will consist of. There are reasons for which I have condemned myself to having to take eight classes during the first semester of my senior year, I promise you. One of them being that I studied abroad last semester in London and leisurely took only three classes. The other being that I equally love both Music and Literature and couldn’t bear to completely cut one out of my life.
Literature won the major spot in my academic career however, because when I was a freshman and my parents asked the dreaded question of: What are you going to do with your life? (They were very for having a plan ahead of time) the one thing I could come up with was write a book. Creative Writing might have been the major more inclined for that, but I had always wanted to strengthen my text analysis skills before I did my writing ones. This would then lead me to want a Masters’ of Arts degree in Creative Writing later.
Backtracking a bit, once I decided what my major would be, I had remembered that during my first semester as a freshman at college I had taken some music classes since I’d shown interest in the subject on one of the many surveys Manhattanville had us take. I missed having music as part of my daily life, since in high school I had been part of multiple choruses and music classes. I also knew that I would like to have some flexibility in my schedule for the years to come, with dreams of studying abroad and internships on my horizon. This all led me to decide to minor in Music instead of double-majoring. My simplest reason being that I wanted to do what made me happy while I still had the freedom to indulge myself with whatever interested me in the moment. Even with my dream job of being an editor for a successful publishing house looming in my future, my morning piano class and late night acapella group rehearsals matter as much to me as my psychoanalytic theories and literary magazines.