I have three undergraduates and one former grad student sitting in my office on this sunny Thursday morning. The undergrads have all just come from my class on “The Femme Fatale in Literature” and they’re exhausted after having read up to chapter 58 in Vanity Fair.
Curly-haired Stella, who’s graduating this year, is muttering that English majors “get no respect” as she heats instant mac-and-cheese in my office microwave. Tim sits in the Dangerous Chair, a rickety wooden one I’ve dragged around since my days as a grad student at Queens College; it takes a daring soul to put him or herself in that seat. He is brave enough to nod in agreement, which puts him an even more precarious position. Julie sits at one computer, poised to complete whatever task I assign (she’s a junior and working for me this semester — she throws away food when the expiration date is more than three years old and she’s a photocopying demon). Karen, the newly minted Ph.D. of recent zombie fame, is working on her laptop, busily revising the opening paragraph of her book proposal.
(It’s a good thing I have a big office.)
The “no respect” discussion started because Stella’s boyfriend, a medical student who puts up science jokes up on his Facebook page that only other science people will understand, teases her about how easy she has it as an English major. Stella’s taking three heavy-duty lit classes in addition to writing her honors thesis this semester and doesn’t find her boyfriend the least bit charming at the moment.
Apparently a lot of Tim’s friends are science people, too, and they keep talking about how much tougher it is for them than it is for him. Tim works all the time at an on-campus job, as an editor of the undergraduate magazine, as the head of two large clubs, and on his own scholarship. “That doesn’t count when your friends are chemistry majors,” he explains.
Julie’s brother already works for a Fortune 500 company, and he’s only two years older than she is. As a business and psychology major, he’s making more money than she’ll see for the next 10 years. She corrects me. “Twenty.” Without looking up, Karen says, “Don’t get me started.” She sounds bitter. She wants to know where Julie’s brother is working and whether they’d be interested in hiring a newly minted English Ph.D.
I tell them about a young woman I know who makes $325,000 a year. She’s thirty-three.
“I bet she isn’t really happy,” says Tim.
No, she’s perfectly happy, I reply.
“What do you want to do when you’re finished?” Tim asks Stella out of curiosity.
“I want to teach,” she begins, and immediately launches into a rant about her relatives, friends, and even strangers who assume that she’s decided to get her certification because that is the only thing she’s qualified to do. “I want to be a teacher. Want to,” she insists.
“I get the same treatment, but when I say it I get doubting looks. My family knows I’m notoriously high-maintenance. When I say I might like to teach, they get this look on their faces like I’m out of my mind.”
“Do you like nice things?” asks Julie with a knowing look at Stella. “Because you’ll kiss those nice things goodbye if you decide on teaching,” says Julie cynically. “Right now I feel like I can still have nice things and my dignity, but if I teach, I can’t have both. The numbers don’t add up.”
“A teacher’s salary is $42,000 a year,” I say, trying to inject a little optimism into the conversation. “With benefits. Never underestimate the power of benefits.”
I ask Tim where he sees himself in 10 years. “In PR,” he sighs. “It’s soul-crushing work, but at least I know there will always be someone who needs his or her ego stroked. I know I can whore myself out that way.”
“At least you’re making me feel a little better about my career choice,” murmurs Stella.
What are we deciding, I ask? Do English majors have it easier or harder than other majors?
“I know not to make that comparison,” says Stella. “I know not to judge another person’s work. I know I’m up until 3 a.m. reading and they can pack up and nod off around twelve. Other majors don’t get tested until the next exam. I need to be prepared on a day-to-day basis. It’s harder when you love it. It’s not just something you have to do. You have to understand what’s going on or the English major inside you cries. You can’t skim. There’s no meta-cognition involved in those other disciplines” says Stella and laughs at her own use of the term.
“It’s not like math majors discover the proof that solves the equation,” adds Karen. dryly. “It’s work for robots.”
“We draw our own conclusions every day when they’re poring over old theorems and making career plans to number-crunch in a cubicle. I had a math professor last semester who admitted she read Calc textbooks for fun when she would travel. Oh, you know, just a little differential calculus for a bit of light reading. I really had to wonder what the hell was wrong with her after that,” says Julie. “I look at her, know she’s emotionally stunted, and immediately feel better about myself.”
“No, really!” shouts Stella. “Wouldn’t you say we’re more emotionally intelligent than your average math or business major? Ha! I shouldn’t be yelling as I say this, should I! Ha! My boyfriend won’t read fiction, and he says he knows he should, but he just doesn’t. I just can’t wrap my head around that. I mean, life without an imaginative element is two-dimensional. You learn how to think from multiple perspectives. So there.”
“In all seriousness, though,” says Tim, “You really come to respect even the characters you dislike because you can understand them. Even the narrow-minded undergraduates.”
“When I was younger,” says Julie, “I used to sit in my elementary-school math classes and stare at those stupid timed multiplication tests and personify the numbers. All the odd numbers were evil and the evens were good. Meanwhile, I hadn’t done a single problem and my classmates had finished. My brain wasn’t made for that crap. I’m not going to judge people who get a kick out of stats and calc, but can’t they extend the same courtesy to me?”
“I don’t get no respect,” says Tim in his best Rodney Dangerfield voice. I suggest that if this bunch has nothing better to do except to hang out in my office, maybe they don’t deserve any.
Then we start talking about Vanity Fair.
36 Responses to English Majors Don’t Get No Respect
ex_ag - February 4, 2010 at 4:36 pm
Geesh, first you publish a bunch of trifling student essays in here, and now this!You really seem to get a kick out of painting your students in a terrible light. The combination of arrogance and soap-opera pathos is nauseating. I can see why no one gives them any respect.
bookgirl - February 4, 2010 at 8:53 pm
Gina, please tell your students that English majors do get respect both within and outside the academic world. I am a proud (and respected) English major. And for the record, all p.r. is not soul-crushing.
deanette - February 4, 2010 at 9:54 pm
I love when you talk about your students and when you let their voices come through, that’s even better. Tell Stella her guy will always tell science jokes but even he probably won’t be as cranky as ex_ag, who’s clearly a serious loser.
ganthemuff - February 4, 2010 at 10:34 pm
I am going to graduate with an M.A. in English this May – and this article does not make me feel good!
suomynona - February 5, 2010 at 8:45 am
It’s interesting that p.r. comes up in this article, particularly as it’s cast in a negative light by English majors. Because the lack of p.r. effort, let alone skills, among us literature people plays a key role in our lack of respect in the wider world. I would imagine just about every English major around knows what it’s like to be subjected to dismissive comments from people in STEM or business fields. My personal favorite is when I’m being introduced to new people in a group of fellow PhD students from different disciplines, and when I say “English” I get polite nods, and when my friend says “astrophysics,” everyone starts raving about how much a genius my friend must be. Since the average person we encounter can speak and read English but cannot do astrophysics, the frequent assumption is that English majors just sit around and read and then write down our opinions or share our opinions in a classroom like it’s some glorified sesssion of Oprah’s book club. This is our fault.As I’ve mentioned here before, I socialize primarily with people in the science and math and engineering departments at my university. These people are extremely bright, well read, and old enough to have done a few different things in the world before arriving at their PhDs. Yet when I first met them, most had absolutely no idea what English majors and scholars do. In fact, most of their imperssions were nothing short of outrageous. None of them understood the concept of research beyond its lab contexts, and were utterly perplexed about the idea of looking for and screening and analyzing textual information. Most of them didn’t know that language fields have academic journals, and that English scholarship involves citations of other scholarly work, and peer review. They were under the impression that we read a book, then personally respond to it in order to give our ‘enlightened’ (and they meant this word sincerely, mind you) interpretation of the meaning of the book, and the author’s intent. Still others thought that English majors and even English PhD students read books and occasionally write about them as training for becoming creative writers and writing our own books of literature. To sum it up, many people in the 21st century still believe in the ‘gentleman scholar’ approach of centuries past, in which a privileged class did readings for a broader class of illiterates. All of this is why STEM people look down their noses at English majors. These are massive gardens of ignorance that people in literature fields should be working much harder and more effectively to stomp out. I know the tendency in many of us is to become passive aggressive about it and flaunt how much work we do, how late we stay up, how exhausted we are; but if we don’t enlighten people on what exactly the work is that we’re doing, they’ll only think of us as that much sillier for spending so much time and energy recording our glorious opinions on Philip Pullman.
lowenstm - February 5, 2010 at 9:05 am
Two small things jump out for me. One is Stella’s reference to meta-cognition; the other is at the end of the first paragraph in comment #5: “It’s our fault.” Here’s the connection. English (and other humanities) majors need to be taught to think about the skills they are developing at a higher level of abstraction so that they can speak articulately about the places outside the classroom where they will be useful. Faculty who believe that the only valid use of an English major is to become an English professor (or K-12 teacher) do their students a devastating disservice. More intentionality in the English syllabus and classroom would arm students better to respond to their STEM friends – and to explore a wider range of careers.
suomynona - February 5, 2010 at 9:23 am
lowenstm,You make a good point about the need for some broader abstracting of lit. ‘skills’, but I would push back slightly on one thing. If we’re talking about employability, I don’t think English majors have anything to be ashamed of. Postgraduate salaries of English majors lag behind STEM fields, but one could reasonably attribute this to the types of careers people in English curricula are *chosing*, rather than assuming they’re being *reduced* to lower paying jobs like teaching or nonprofit work. The same logic should be rightly applied to people who choose to study English in the first place: that they’re not picking an English major because they really wanted to be an engineer but weren’t smart enough. And I worked for two years between degrees in ‘blue chip’ consulting firms, and found plenty of English majors who had decided to pursue a different kind of career and were very well prepared to articulate precisely what you call for. I don’t think it’s an anomaly; and actually recent articles have suggested that business employers are looking for more English major types, precisely becasue of their abilities in writing and abstract reasoning. But I think there’s more to why people look down at English majors, more than their employment prospects (which, again, are what English majors generally choose for themselves). There’s also the perception that the actual work in the field is lighter and easier and requires less intellectual rigor and ability than STEM subjects. And that really is a perception problem that English majors and professors need to be more concerned with, and more active in dispelling.
beaugard - February 5, 2010 at 10:17 am
Yes, it’s odd the low status of English majors. If one studies “Comparative Literature”, for example, even that sounds more impressive than “English major”, although I suspect the two are pretty similar. Even a philosophy major gets more respect. One can’t do anything with it, but most people assume the philosophy major is “brainy”, in a similar way to someone studying physical sciences.Of course, as a refugee from the Ph.D. program in English Lit at CUNY(mid-nineties), I saw first-hand the complete and utter destruction of the humanities(English, Art History, etc.) wrought by post-modernism, cultural studies and deconstruction, which doesn’t help the field either.And the student’s use of the word, “meta-cognitive” was particularly depressing, even though she laughed while she said it. Meaningless, vacuous jargon shouldn’t have any place in the study of great writing, in my opinion.And it’s not true that the sciences don’t investigate themselves. For example, there’s “foundations of mathematics” and “philosophy of science”, both very important and thriving, as far as I know.
dank48 - February 5, 2010 at 10:17 am
Any chance there’s an element of fiction in the narrative?
speterfreund - February 5, 2010 at 10:19 am
Folks, we’ve been here before. Who still reads Thomas Love Peacock’s “The Four Ages of Poetry,” which argues that poetry has run its course and commends scientific discourse as its worthy successor?–certainly many fewer than read _A Defence of Poetry_, P. B. Shelley’s response. Who reads T. H. Huxley’s “Science and Culture” without reading Matthew Arnold’s rebuttal, “Literature and Science”?Pay scales are what they are because the modern and postmodern eras have been intoxicated with the technology and gadgetry of the object world–so much so that we forget that the subject world has its own technology. Approached by a would-be mugger, one would likely choose to deploy the former (a personal-sized mace spray) rather than the latter (Portia’s speech on “the quality of mercy” from _The Merchant of Venice_). But while the former might make one safe for the time being, it is the latter that makes one human.Gina Barreca’s piece makes reference in passing to _Vanity Fair_, subtitled _A Novel without a Hero_. I suggest that the true hero of that novel–and of numerous other texts–is the reader who, although s/he may be tested by the very act of reading it, is confirmed in his/her fundamental humanity. Now that’s not $325K/year, but it is a design for living.
upadouble - February 5, 2010 at 10:43 am
It seems strange to me that an article on how little respect English majors feel should go out of its way to express a lack of understanding and respect for what a math major entails. Math majors do work to understand and come up with their own proofs of the theorems they use. Calculus classes are where the math major starts, not where it ends. That math professor’s claim to read calculus books for pleasure was a joke; Julie seems to have missed the humor. Ignorance of what doing mathematics involves–both for the major and for the professor–is widespread. From discussions at lunch, reading groups outside my specialty, attendance at other disciplines’ professional meetings, and serving on my university’s promotion and tenure committee I’ve learned that serious scholarly work in different disciplines is done differently, presented in very different ways to those in the discipline, needs some particular care to communicate to those outside the discipline (which is harder in some areas than in others), and often involves careful consideration of questions that people outside the discipline would never have asked or cared about the answers to. Part of serious scholarship is caring about your subject enough to study it deeply. Others won’t care as much or understand why you care so much. That’s not always lack of respect.
ksingh - February 5, 2010 at 10:56 am
It is hard to look like you’re “working” when you are sitting around reading novels, so I totally get it! Then again, why did we major in English? Wasn’t for the money….. Wasn’t for the fame…..
literarytype - February 5, 2010 at 11:13 am
It’s great to hear undergraduates sound like undergraduates, by which I mean as unashamedly silly, self-absorbed, and enthusiastic as the students in this post. I grow weary of students who are too hip to be passionate.
n3103f - February 5, 2010 at 11:23 am
Perhaps lack of respect (and I’m not convinced that is the right word – after all, it’s not like we’re talking about Communications degrees…) stems from the density of the filter applied to graduates. One graduates with a medical, engineering or accounting degree only after significant filtering has been applied resulting in a ‘branding’ (as long as PR has been introduced into the conversation) that is recognizable by the general population (you can fix my broken arm, you can build a bridge, you can do my tax return, etc.) Even certification and licensing is specifically associated with matriculation in those fields. With English there is no discernable filter resulting in a productivity the public has come to associate with those degrees. Further, the rigor of the filtering that does occur in English departments is much less dense. One can emerge from such a program in the way suggested in this article (e.g., smarter, nuanced thinker, etc.) or, not.
cwinton - February 5, 2010 at 11:28 am
I think I’ve always had a pretty good idea of what an English major entails. I find it sad that the English majors described apparently are so inwardly focused as to have little comprehension of what other majors entail, even with friends pursuing other disciplines. Few, if any, who graduate with a major in mathematics take a “mathematics job” unless it is to teach. Ditto for science. The preoccupation with money and employment expressed here is remarkable. So why do math majors often end up in highly paid jobs? Could it be the discipline requires development of deep logical intuition, precise lines of thought, and the ability to articulate a well reasoned argument? STEM displines evidently encourage development of intellectual traits that employers view as value added. Even the so-called “professional” STEM areas recognize the value of a broad liberal arts background. Perhaps English majors should seek to be a bit less myopic and develop a broader range of interests.
dank48 - February 5, 2010 at 11:35 am
A man said to the universe:”Sir, I exist!”"However,” replied the universe,”The fact has not created in meA sense of obligation.”Of course today many students probably wouldn’t touch a book called War Is Kind. I’m with LiteraryType; there’s such a thing as being too cool, too hip, and irony is a slippery, tricky, dangerous weapon that cares not whom blood it cuts. These undergrads do sound almost as shallow, feckless, and self-absorbed as we were, and just as human. I wonder what they’d make of Borges: “Like all men, he was given hard times to live in.”
johntoradze - February 5, 2010 at 11:57 am
I was once a student in an english class at UC Berkeley. I wrote an essay, and some circled sentences were marked so that my grade was a D. So, I went to the professor who told me that what I had written were not sentences. I went through it lexically, and said it was. We ended up arguing for about 20 minutes.Finally, the prof pulled herself up and said archly, “You know, I have a PhD in English! You should listen!” I was so astonished, so completely surprised (blown away is what we said then) that my jaw dropped. You should have seen the look on her face. I still chuckle thinking about it. I was so young and transparent. She got up, called over another professor and asked him to pass judgement. He looked at the sentences in question and said, “He’s right. Those are correctly constructed sentences. But, they are unweildy, overly complicated, and you shouldn’t write English that way.” My grade on that paper only went up to a B after that.
suomynona - February 5, 2010 at 1:25 pm
#14:”One can emerge from such a program in the way suggested in this article (e.g., smarter, nuanced thinker, etc.) or, not.”Do you mean to suggest that while it’s very possible that one can emerge from a program in English literature without having gained much at all, the credentialing processes in other disciplines like accounting and engineering serve as adequate guaranteurs that no or less such risks exist in these ‘licsnesed’ or credentialed fields? If so, I’m not sure about that. For one, you don’t need a CPA to graduate with a degree in accounting, or a practicing license to graduate with a degree in psychology. There really isn’t even such a thing as a medical undergraduate degree in the US; so if we’re comparing apples to apples, I’m qutie sure that doing a doctorate in English literature has certain associated requirements (like producing original, peer reviewed research) that a medical doctorate does not, even though such things might be typically part of the medical school experience. So I’m not really sure what you’re saying. If you’re saying what I think you’re saying, I think you’re relying on ‘branded’ conceptions to come to your realization that the filter for English majors is any weaker than for math or pre-med sciences or social sciences or accounting. The argument is circular: these (accounting, etc.) are branded as filtered and credentialed disciplines, causing us to think of them as such; and because we think of them as such, they must be filtered and credentialed disciplines.#15:You’re right to suggest that English majors need to think more widely about how their studies fit into other kinds of employment besides the kinds that many people go into English to do: academic, nonprofit, publishing, editorial, teaching, etc. Again, I think you don’t credit English majors enough for doing this, as I see them working in all kinds of fields (I’m involved with my alma mater in a number of mentoring and internship programs). But…”STEM displines evidently encourage development of intellectual traits that employers view as value added.”The reason for this is largely, like #14 suggests, and like I have suggested above, the way math is branded compared to English. But in terms of actual content, there really isn’t much difference between theoretical math or physics and literary theory. The former can be applied in a number of ways that the latter cannot; but then again theory isn’t exactly the biggest ‘applied’ aspect of English lit. training, either. Math majors frequetnly get high paying jobs because they’re viewed as scientific and capable, while in some high-paying job fields English majors are not because we suck and branding ourselves and often would rather remain aloof than engaged in selling our importance to the world.
suomynona - February 5, 2010 at 1:28 pm
Sorry, when I write about ‘content’ above, I don’t mean it literally. I mean the content in theoretical math and in literary theory is actually pretty equally ‘useless’ in the immediate sense. Apologies for my sloppy language above.
citrita - February 5, 2010 at 2:15 pm
My B.A. is in English because when I looked through the undergraduate course offerings, there were more courses of intense interest in that department than in others, I’ve also read calculus books for fun. (No joke: for a while, calculus problem sets and crossword puzzles had about equal appeal.)The institution granting that degree did not allow minors, but if they had, likely i had enough credits in French, Comp Lit, and Theatre to claim minor status. I had planned to major in mathematics, but the courses there simply were not up to the quality of those in other disciplines, so after two years of tepid calculus I went fiercely in other directions.When people denigrate a discipline, it speaks poorly of them, not the discipline. At my current university, I was recently told of such an instance of academic snobbery. Folks affiliated with the courses in performing and visual arts were told, with meaningful glances, that a large number of student athletes seemed to be signing up for those courses. First, our student athletes are no dodos, or they would not be here. Second, the courses, like some sports, are intense and demanding–and most require performance of a very visible kind. It would be a mistake to think for even a moment that classes in the arts are a good choice for the simple-minded. I believe one of our reasonably recent graduates, a fellow whose degree was in either Physics or Molecular Biology, with a couple of certificates in one or another engineering discipline, went on to become a professional choreographer because he learned here how much he loved dance.In the end, it’s not a question of what you learn or what you take as a degree discipline, but what you love. For the last 40 years, I’ve worked in academic computing–successfully, with no scholastic or scholarly credentials in that area. It’s one of several successful careers I’ve managed over the years, none of them teaching English, but all of them building upward from the foundation of a B.S. in English.
emwhite - February 5, 2010 at 2:19 pm
When I started teaching English majors, way back in 1960, I’d ask a typical class about what they expected to be doing five years after graduation. Almost all used to say they would be teaching and writing. Before I retired and moved away from California in 2000 the same question got a very different response. Only two or three had that same aspiration. What did most of them want to be? Prison guards, believe it or not, yes, prison guards. Better pay, they told me, and better working conditions. Alas.
neever - February 5, 2010 at 2:24 pm
If I could have just a nickel for all the times my business-degree-turned Wall Street friends turned their noses up when I said I worked in publishing, I’d be the one bailing out the banks now. But there is something to be said for loving your job and your work day in and day out, and knowing that yes, you will probably work until you’re 70, but you will be doing something that excites you, that inspires you, and that you genuinely enjoy.
michygeary - February 5, 2010 at 2:42 pm
Oh, it’s so nice to see the usual slimy cretins coming out of the woodwork to turn up their noses and share with us their usual trite blathering. I’m just waiting for leontrout to start Facebook-searching these four students and demanding to know which of the usernames here belong to them.Anyway, great article, B. As an English major with too many science friends, I completely sympathize.
ljacob - February 5, 2010 at 2:48 pm
I must agree with neever that there is definitely something to be said for loving your job day in and day out. I am a high school English teacher and, like Stella, I wanted to be one and I love it. So to all those who say that “being an English major is easy” and “that anyone can teach” just remember the person who taught you the most and helped you get to that fancy degree you have. Chances are that person was a teacher and I’m willing to put money on the fact that she (or he) may have been your English teacher.
cjmventer - February 6, 2010 at 2:18 am
Even in movies, the science/math professors are glorified and called in when the earth is in peril, but English professors are usually relegated to being either ridiculous or pathetic or both. I was thinking about this today and I asked myself, “how come I didn’t pick a field where I’d be called in for my expertise if giant bugs invaded the world or something?”Just once I’d like aliens to invade that require all communications to be in perfect sestinas (or else) so they’d have to call in an English professor.
amnirov - February 6, 2010 at 7:38 am
But the study of literature really is easy. And an English degree isn’t all that useful in the real world.
suomynona - February 6, 2010 at 8:12 am
amnirov is absolutely correct. The study of literature is very easy, so easy that most of us pick up all the attendant skills as children, which prevents us in adulthood from making such erros as gross oversimplification, superstitious thinking, or the fabrication of false boundaries based on crude assumption.
cmsmw - February 6, 2010 at 9:11 am
I have perhaps a unique perspective here, because I have a B.S. in chemistry and later went on to earn a Ph.D. in English after several years working in industry as a technical writer and simultaneously earning an M.A. in professional writing. Folks like amnirov and suomynona will continue to hold fast to their unsupported assertions, I’m sure, but my experience was that my mentors in the two English departments where I studied for my graduate degrees were every bit as demanding in terms of clarity and rigor of analysis as my STEM mentors were. Claiming, as suomynona does, that studying literature is something that can be mastered by children is just as silly as saying the same for mathematics.
ex_ag - February 6, 2010 at 9:53 am
Oh goody. The kiddies are back. And taking up right where they left off, and they are still 1) assuming that name-calling is a viable form of argumentation and 2) failing to see through their own narcissism to recognize how poorly they come off in Barreca’s blog.The arrogance behind their assumption that an English degree grants them a special, more penetrating, and superior insight into the rest of humanity is probably the reason they get no respect. Their shortcomings are difficult to ignore, or stomach.But, to their credit, they are not so different from the (presumed) adults filling the comments section with the same brand of “wisdom.”
suomynona - February 6, 2010 at 10:07 am
cmsmw in #28,I’m sorry to have drawn antagonism from someone on the same side of the argument as myself, but…you might want to read my post in #27 a bit more carefully and flag the severe sarcasm I was directing at amnirov in #26. You might also read upthread all of my posts in unwavering defense of the importance and rigor of the study of literature. And I, too, have a non-humanities background and am working on my PhD in English; and I, too, find the study of literature every bit as rigorous and demanding as other fields. I was just poking fun at amnirov, who could have just been baiting people like me.
cmsmw - February 6, 2010 at 10:15 am
suomynona:Indeed you’re right — my apologies. That’s what I get for reading this before I’ve finished breakfast.
cmsmw - February 6, 2010 at 10:22 am
By the way, I did read through the entire thread before responding, but I hadn’t paid much attention to the name labels (as I should have), so the opening sentence in #27 didn’t read as sarcasm. Again, apologies.
baute95 - February 7, 2010 at 11:00 am
It’s funny (and sad) how the value of the job depends on the salary. Even in your article Gina, you can’t avoid talking about it. That’s how society works. However, as you point out “never underestimate the power of benefits”, and I guess every “human science” activity has a human type of benefit which is so hard to value.
deanette - February 7, 2010 at 1:34 pm
That’s how society works is right, especially when you are the one paying your own bills without the help of a spouse or any family members. It’s realistic to address the money part of the question. Your “benefits’ angle is clever though, and helps remind us that other parts of the package count, too. But money and jobs is the big equation in the math most people do.
drj50 - February 12, 2010 at 1:10 pm
Too many undergraduates wrongly assume that they face a stark choice between “what I love” or “what will make money.” One doesn’t need to have make one’s living as an artist to continue creating art throughout one’s life. The same is true for majors in literature, music, philosophy, history, etc. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. (Dabling in nuclear engineering in your free time may be a little harder. The neighbors, not to mention various federal agencies, may complain.) Most people have a variety of talents and passions (in varying degrees). We sell ourselves short if we think that there is only one thing we can do and be happy, that any other job would just be misery. I have discovered a host of talents that I enjoy using — of which I had no idea when I was 20. The trick is to draw all of these into my life, whether or not I am able to do all of them in my job.I am grateful for my undergraduate degree in English. I wish, however, that I had been wise enough to also take some courses (a minor?) that would have provided a better foundation for some sort of work after school — if only to have made it easier to fund those years of graduate studies (in a different liberal arts discipline) if I had had a marketable skill like, oh, accounting or journalism. It’s not about a job. It’s about a life (that includes a job).
jmg06005 - February 25, 2010 at 12:55 pm
Athletic students no dodos, Citrita? I’ve tutored and lived alongside division 1 athletes in college. There ARE instances of those student-athletes that can do it all, but they’re the exception, not the rule. I find that I encounter more dodos. If I see more than 3 athletes from one team in a class, I know it isn’t a class I’m going to feel challenged in and generally drop it. The attitude of most of the athletes I deal with on a daily basis at my school is one of arrogance and a “classes-aren’t-what-I’m-here-for” swagger.