1. Emails from Carla. Let’s face it, Carla’s emails are the highlight of your day and of your inbox in general. With anything from the color-coded emails to the “English Course of the Day” emails towards the end of every semester, any email from Carla is bound to make you smile.
2. Sleeping the day away on Fridays while all of your science major friends are in class. Being an English major at UNH definitely has its perks; we work hard Monday to Thursday and then have a three-day weekend every week. We can’t complain.
3. Ham Smith. No matter how much we all complain about Ham Smith, we secretly love it. We love everything from the flickering bathroom lights, creaky stairs, world’s most uncomfortable desks, to the professor offices that are physically impossible to find, and even the horrible smell. All of which are what give the building its charm.
4. Finding 3 uninterrupted hours to write a paper. Being able to get a break from the three novels you are reading at a time, multiple essays due, and finding the time to write a ten page paper with no interruptions is quite possibly one of the best feelings in the world. It is a sheer moment of bliss when you are under no time crunch with any distractions, and for those rare moments we are grateful.
5. Reading a novel written by your professor. Sometimes you just find your niche in that one class with that one professor and being able to have a hard copy of a book that they wrote to take with you after the semester ends is pretty cool. Not to mention that these professors even have time to write a book on top of teaching, grading papers, going to meetings, and making lesson plans. Our hats go off to you faculty, keep filling up that glass case on the first floor!
6. Getting wifi for more than sixty consecutive seconds in Ham Smith. Seeing as Ham Smith is the Bermuda Triangle or black hole for wifi on campus, you basically feel like Judd Nelson fisting pumping at the end of The Breakfast Club when you get that one tiny bar for even a minute.
7. Having a group of people that you can talk about “English major things” with who won’t judge you for it. William Shakespeare or Jane Austen? The Oxford Comma or misused quotations? Coffee or tea? These are a few of our favorite things.
8. Free cake on Shakespeare’s birthday. Need I say more?
9. When UNH English major alum win Oscars. For all of those that may look at us and think an English major is useless, Jennifer Lee, director of ‘Frozen’, is proof that you can do just about anything that you put your mind to. Congrats Jennifer Lee!