When I tell people I’m studying English with a concentration in creative writing, I get two responses.
“Oh, that must be so easy!”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.”
The latter usually comes from other students studying English in some shape or form at IU.
I wasn’t always an English major. I came to IU as an astrophysics major, so I can sufficiently judge the difficulty of an English major opposed to a natural sciences major.
Let me tell you: they are about equal in difficulty.
Sure, when studying science, you have to also study math, and I will agree that studying math is incredibly difficult. Math is the reason I stopped pursuing an astrophysics major.
However, that doesn’t mean that studying literature or the craft of writing is any easier. Of course, you don’t have to cram for a finite exam or an orgo midterm.
Instead, you have to figure out how you’re going to fit reading three different books each week into your schedule and how you will possibly write the next draft of your short story when you have severe writer’s block.
Don’t get me wrong, English majors are gifted with fantastic leniency from their professors. That’s because they were all English majors once, too.
Being an English major is not uncommon in many liberal arts universities, but the number of students declaring their major as English is on a decline.
For some reason, liberal arts degrees in general are on a decline.
In a world where jobs require several degrees, students believe that they have to have “practical” degrees in fields like natural science or business.
There are plenty of jobs available for those students who have natural science degrees, but English students have a wide variety of options as well.
Having a liberal arts major such as English, history or even music composition can open so many doors to different avenues of business.
Not only can English majors write best-selling novels or get awards for groundbreaking journalism, they typically also write television’s best hits, the music industry’s biggest songs and our textbooks.
English majors are the nation’s brightest thinkers.
One of the most important skills you can learn in college is to read and write critically.
These skills are acquired through all of the books and articles that we spend many late nights reading.
I probably get as much sleep as kids in Kelley or math majors, which isn’t very much sleep.
It’s kinda funny to hear kids from other majors complain about how much work they have or how many pages of reading they have to do for one class.
And of course the preconceived notion that English majors are snobby is kind of true. We are. We think we are more educated because we have read Kurt Vonnegut or T.S. Eliot’s condescending view of the modernist movement.
However, English majors are also some of the most empathetic students on campus. We spend so much time reading tragedies and comedies and all works in between that we have to be well versed in our own emotions.
Creative writing majors are especially in tune with their emotions, or else we wouldn’t be able to write the fifteenth poem about our ex that we turned in for workshop the week before.
Many students seamlessly combine English with other majors creatively to ensure better job success.
Just remember your friend studying English may be cranky because they just wrote a ten-page paper on why a specific color of wallpaper is significant and give them a break. All majors are difficult in their own right and they all have importance in the job market.
Unless you are an underwater basket weaving major.
