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