What can you do with an English degree?

Whilst sitting with my peers at the end of last semester as I turned in my 43 pages of final project agony (which dragged me into a flu-like  illness after a few all-nighters), I realized that the 18 of us would soon find ourselves graduated and out in the real world with English degrees — more specifically, non-fiction creative writing English degrees.

At that point, it came to me: What in the hell can one do with something like that? The University of Pittsburgh has the distinction of having the oldest English writing program in the nation, and, to be honest, not as much clout as one would think to go along with it. It doesn’t have the prestige of a Harvard bachelor’s degree in the field of novel-style writing. We don’t have transcendentalists in the 412 so much as we have pseudo-intellectual hipsters hanging out at Caribou Coffee shops, so that heightened level of morality or self-discovery through the craft isn’t quite present, either.

And we’re not Northwestern — or even Kent or OU (two institutions that have fantastic journalism programs, but I’d rather pull out my teeth with a pair of pliers and without sedatives than seek an undergraduate education at either of them) — when it comes to journalism. In fact, Pitt just consolidated its journalism program into its non-fiction program, further promulgating the notion I brought forward in my Pitt News column that traditional journalism is, in fact, dead.

So where does that bring the Pitt student, much less anyone with a writing degree? No, further expanding this concept, where does bring the English major in general? Let’s face it, lit majors are more useless than writing majors despite being the more popular major of the two.

Kent and OU place their journalism programs within their MassComm departments of their respective institution, but for the sake of argument, I will also lump comm majors with English majors because their degrees are as equally useless. Come on, when you think comm majors, you generally think about the star basketball players who are enrolled in the program because basket weaving just isn’t offered too much anymore.

And that leaves all of us out of luck, doesn’t it? Unless one of us makes it as a breakthrough author, we’re all destitute to a life of $12 an hour as baristas, or insurance salespeople, or something wholly underpaid and underappreciated. We’re like marketing majors (Disclaimer: I am a marketing major in addition to English) only with less usable skills.

Or are we? Are English majors really that screwed? I don’t think so. But first, I’d like to point a finger or two directly at the institutions that provide us our educations and say that they’re doing all of us a great disservice. No, worse, they’re punishing English majors by feeding us into our own myopic interpretations of grandeur while not fully instilling the cornerstones that we need to succeed.

Most English writing majors want to go into professional novel writing or education. To fuel our ideas in the fictional world, we have heroes like Johnny Depp’s Hunter S. Thompson, who is constantly in a drug-induced haze, and David Duchovny’s sex-addicted Hank Moody, who, while he is one of my favorite characters of all time, is completely unrealistic for most of us. And he’s also a tortured soul that while we’d all like to be like in some ways, is not really as much of a person to look up to so much as a cautionary example of what not to be.

With the exception of an internship for credit class I took this past semester (finding it by accident, no less), I went five years in the English department without having any formal education on how to prepare a resume properly. I took a mandatory in the school of business that largely taught the same curriculum, but English majors generally don’t get that. And I have also taught myself how to do such things to a professional skill level. But that took a while — a long while, a tedious while.

So most are fraught with a degree they half-know how to use and no idea how to contact potential agents/employers. Awesome. And that’s where English majors get the bad rap.

It’s not necessary, though. I just completed an internship working corporate communications at an international company. No one had a master’s degree. Everyone either had a degree in communications or journalism, and being honest, I felt humbled in their presence, learning the skills needed to succeed in such a high-level position. Yeah, that’s right, the people running the communications department were basically English people who excelled in their field. Those people provide the voice of the entire company to the outside world.

There are also technical writing roles, such as the one that a professor of mine — a poetry major — said she got into because her craft just didn’t pay the bills. She now teaches the craft to engineering students at Carnegie-Mellon.

There are also publications management roles and various other leadership positions that we’re never told about. We have panels of people with very similar journalistic jobs come in and tell us we’re not screwed, yet none of them ever provide roles for students to follow outside of the dying print media industry — not even blogging. That could stem from the fact that 40- and 50-somethings lecturing us simply have no idea how to make a living with the internet.

To get a job in doing one’s first love, free-form writing, it probably means initially going into a miserable job, and then struggling with a burgeoning writing career as it takes off alongside some burdensome day job. It’ll mean packing up in a minute’s notice for an interview in New York when the opportunity calls and going in to an interview in wrinkled street clothes — because real artists don’t interview in suits.

What I mean to say in all of this is that there are many ways to peel a grape, and English majors are generally trained to be existential, artsy-fartsy people with all of the talent in the world but absolutely no direction. We’re not taught how to market ourselves, and I think it’s a shame. But between my own aspirations of writing and my Baby Boomer mother’s who is working on finally cresting in her career, I’ve seen firsthand that writing professionally needs a bit more oomph than, say, an engineering job where employers are practically begging you for your services.

The world doesn’t know it, but we need more great writers, captivating storytellers. Unfortunately, it’s a lot tougher to enlighten the world to that fact, especially when everyone in the media is up in arms about catching up to Chinese proficiencies in math and science. But without the ability to convey messages, to broaden thought and provoke action, all of the math in the world wouldn’t be worth a darn. So no, English isn’t useless; as a society, let’s stop pretending it is.

“Nothing is impossible to a willing heart.”

~John Heywood, sixteenth century author

Stop the wussification of America

Full disclosure: This originally ran in the Dec. 2, 2010 Pitt News. It can be seen here. This version has some additional content. Enjoy.

After last week’s food-induced coma and the action movie marathon that began with the cult classic “Shogun Assassin,” my oldest brother went on a rant concerning perhaps the most controversial topic facing the United States: the BCS college football poll.

No offense to our government or the TSA, but far more controversy lies in ranking our nation’s college football teams. While the Pitt football team has once again found a way to make a $25 season ticket worthless, there’s still plenty of reason to mention the BCS.

My brother graduated from a university whose president recently made some remarks concerning non-conference teams gaining a berth into the national championship game. In his interview, Ohio State’s president, Gordon Gee, said that schools like TCU and Boise State shouldn’t play in title games because of their weaker schedules.

The same could be said for any football team in the Big East, but that’s not the point of this column. Nor is my point to talk too much about sports. Leave that to the guys a few pages down from here.

Gee’s comments have sparked a litany of response from people who have said his remarks were inappropriate. But perhaps those offended should reflect on the situation with a bit wider perspective.

Gee did nothing wrong. He defended the rigors of the Big Ten conference and took onus in the fact that he believes in his university’s strength as one of the best — as any university head should in a similar situation.

While I’m a believer in Teddy Roosevelt’s “Speak softly and carry a big stick” philosophy, Gee illustrated the proper occasion to ignore it. Call it smack talk, boasting or just good ol’ fashioned fightin’ words, it’s a necessary part of our culture. And there needs to be more of it.

We’ve become a society of wusses, pansies and pacifists. There’s nothing wrong with turning the other cheek when the situation calls for it, but we do it routinely anymore. Then again, we’re trained to.

When I was in first grade, my teacher had a policy of letting her students figure out how to spell words phonetically. However words sounded, spelling them like that would be perfectly acceptable. She called it “creative spelling.”

During my parents’ conference with her, she explained that she wanted to teach impressionable kids with how to explore for themselves and all of that wishy-washy garbage. My mom and dad said that the only way they wanted me to learn how to spell was the right way.

Their conference didn’t last much longer than that, as my parents were shown the door. Four years later, I successfully defended the school of hard knocks by winning Clearmount Elementary’s spelling bee in front of her and everyone else there.

But the wussification of America has spread a great deal since first grade in 1994. I blame much of it on the same premise — the notion of socializing outcomes, of telling everyone that they are special. It’s why college and universities around the country have become degree factories, diluting the value of upper-tier institutions.

It’s why welfare programs are no longer frowned upon in the same light as they were decades ago. And it’s why we have institutions that give people titles like “senior executive vice president” instead of something you or I would understand.

We’re afraid of making people feel un-special.

The converse of this notion, of course, is one of cultivating diversity for diversity’s sake, where everyone is handed the same opportunity and is expected to have similar results at the end. The unfortunate fact is, though, people are not equal and they shouldn’t be treated like they are, either.

Kate Windsor, headmistress of Miss Porter’s School, an upper-crust boarding school, said as much in a July 2009 Vanity Fair article.

“The idea of a structure of hierarchy or power has been really dismissed in our culture as being not part of the American way or the American Dream: ‘We can all do, we can all be and we’re all successful,’” she said. “If you have kids and they play soccer, everybody gets the banner. It doesn’t matter if you lose — sometimes you think, ‘Did we even win?’”

Therein lies a great paradox: Had the U.S. been founded on the today’s “everyone’s a winner” values, it wouldn’t have been founded. Our forefathers would have given up and asked Britain if we could to just get along, perhaps group hug with King George and the royal court.

Now, it seems as though our spirit of competition has become diluted. President Barack Obama has even suggested that the U.S. is burdened with an arduous task of being the world’s premier superpower “whether we like it or not.”

It’s that propagation of extreme pacifism that has ultimately led to such a sentiment, and it’ll eventually lead to downfall through apathy if it’s allowed to continue. This country has always been guided under the principles of rugged individualism, innovation, leadership and, yes, swagger.

Getting along with everyone is noble. But in reality, the best thing we can do for this country is walk into our respective classrooms and workplaces with the belief that we’re each better than the people around us. Then, we should each go out and prove it.