This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at New Paltz chapter.
1) It’s the third week of September and your print quota is already down to $20.
Between 40 page readings and multiple essays, it’s hard to keep your print quota at a reasonable dollar amount. You can always add more, but sometimes, it just feels like $50 isn’t enough.
2) You have four papers due next week, and they’re all analytical essays.
You have to figure out what the color blue represents in that one chapter, of that one novel. Meanwhile you’re not entirely sure what the author (or your professor) is getting at. What could the color blue mean? WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
3) You flinch when you see the length of your required book list.
Sure, your friend in that one science class has a textbook that costs $200, but you have to buy eight novels for one class. That adds up when you’re taking four literature classes a semester! (But guess what:
Thriftbooks has books for incredibly low prices AND
they donate to literacy programs across the country!)
4) You carry around the equivalent of a 9lb bowling ball: The Norton Anthologies.
Every English major has encountered these before: the Norton Anthologies. Otherwise known as the massive collections of the greatest literature that weigh a lot and literally have thousands of pages.
Are you really an English major if you haven’t encountered these yet?
5) You’ve congregated with the other English majors outside Humanities.
English majors seem to move in flocks. They also tend to hang out with Harry Stoneback; New Paltz’s own resident Hemingway expert. You might even be a part of “Stonies Cronies,” the rumored nickname for the English majors who gather around Stoneback before class!
6) The major requirements keep changing.
If you’ve been at New Paltz for a while, you know the English major requirements have changed twice in two years. The most recent is optional; but at the same time, can the faculty just let us live?
7) Sometimes math can be hard. Really hard.
Look, it’s hard to admit. But for some English majors, it’s hard to wrap your mind around numbers. Complicated literary prose? No problem. Dense Shakespearean sonnets? No sweat. But, Trigonometry? No thanks. I would rather be doing scansion (which is determining the unstressed and stressed syllables in a word, in a line of verse… basically, witchcraft) than stare at an equation and come to no real answer.
8) You always find an excuse to buy literature-themed things.
Oh my God, is that a To Kill a Mockingbird umbrella? Is that a Shakespeare bobblehead? You need that a Jane Austen throw pillow RIGHT NOW. You must show the world just how much you love literature, because they clearly didn’t understand how much before.
9) Netflix and chill? More like Shakespeare and weep.
Because you’re an English major, you and the Bard are pretty tight. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t stay up way too late reading a complicated monologue and crying, because your life is a tragedy. Well, at least just your reading life at the moment. Anon!
10) Even though English can be a difficult subject, you love it too much to major in anything else.
There is nothing like opening a new book and discovering a new world, even if it’s for one of your driest classes. You love taking apart a paragraph of beautiful prose, so you can show your teacher just how it affected you. Poetry makes your heart sing. Writing your own novel is your top priority. Whatever you love about English, just know that a book will always love you back.
