Kool Kristine: Majorly on My Mind

There’s a lot to consider when you choose a major. When deliberating on your choice, a lot of the focus seems to be on jobs and life after college—will all of the money and time you put into your undergrad years get you a job? Will the job be the one you want? Will it pay enough for the life style you want? Will it pay off your student loans?

These are all important questions, and ones that I have encountered more than I’d like as an English major. These days, the sciences get attention as the bread-earning, intellectual, progressive, and useful degrees. English, the imaginative cousin to the sciences, is generally eschewed as an impractical degree for kids-at-heart who want to live La Vie Boheme in some ruthless and liberal city as a struggling, albeit brilliant, writer. (I’m the first to admit I’ll probably end up starving in Paris one day with a manuscript in my hands and not enough Euro for wine, but that’s besides the point.)

I chose to major in English because I think reading and writing is fun, I enjoy the challenge of my literature classes, and I love being able to go to a fiction workshop and let my imagination revert to my six year old self for ten minutes for a prompt. But, once I have a diploma in my hand and it’s time for me to confront the “real world”, I think that an English degree will provide me with the flexibility I need—let’s face it, who can predict what they’ll need at fifty when they’re nineteen?

I will always use the writing skills that I’ve developed to write in my own time in the hopes of one day publishing a novel, but I am also eligible to write and edit for magazines, work for an independent publishing house in the city of my choice, write grants for non-profits, or maybe become a professor. Freelancing is always an option as well, and there’s always the hope of surpassing J.K. Rowling as the most successful children’s writer ever. So, though English may not be Pre-Med, I have plenty of options once I graduate. Best of all, these options all fit the life I envision for myself, at least as of today. But, with the flexibility of an English degree, I have no doubts that whatever changes I encounter, my degree will be worth the time and money I poured into it.

So, whether you’re leaning towards Dance, English, Theatre, Communications, Physical Therapy, Philosophy, Forestry, Education, Biology, Environmental Science, Pre-Med, Chemistry, Math, or Art, make sure it is a degree that will fit you: your goals, your strengths, what you think is fun and interesting and useful, the kind of work you want to do when you grow up, how early you want to retire, and—if you have a change of heart in the middle of the career ladder—whether or not your degree has ample shock absorbers to deal with the pot holes and rapid change of direction in your life.