You know you’re an English major when…
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You have a very committed love/hate relationship with LC on Old Campus. (All of your classes are in there. All of them. In the same two rooms. The same two very rickety, very non-temperature-controlled rooms.)
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You have experienced a semester where you have had zero exams, but exactly nineteen papers and forty two Canvas reading responses. (Goodbye last minute cram studying stress, hello last minute speed-writing stress! I personally believe the latter is much, much worse.)
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People automatically assume you did Directed Studies because you read a lot of books for class. (Many English majors did not, in fact, put themselves through DS. Many English majors do not, in fact, understand why anybody would put themselves through DS.)
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Your friends and family buy you literature merch for your birthday and holidays. (How else would you show the world your love of books than to have your favorite coffee mug showcase the phrase “I eat books for breakfast!”)
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People ask you how you’re going to use your degree ALL THE TIME. (Maybe English grad school, maybe law school, maybe marketing or communications, maybe writing the next great American novel, maybe editing, maybe publishing, maybe teaching, I don’t know, there are NO career options for English majors. Not.)
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You use your copy of Paradise Lost as a decorative trinket-holder in your bedroom. (My copy sits below a fake candle from the dollar store! Still love it, though. Kind of.)
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You subconsciously compare people you meet on campus to literary characters. (Actual quote from somebody I know: “OMG [male name here] is SUCH a Captain Ahab.”)
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You have a favorite Shakespeare play and you’ll defend it to the grave! (Everyone is either a Macbeth person or a Hamlet person. If you say you’re neither, you clearly haven’t taken English 201, and it shows.)
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You have had a brief existential crisis halfway through your first year where you decided to ditch the literature life and be solely pre-med/MCDB for about twelve minutes. (It happens to the best of us. It will pass, my darling. It will pass.)
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You love reading, you love writing, and you would never have it any other way– but you know that being an English major is anything but easy. (Writing that 20 page final paper is hard, but think of it this way: you made something that contributes to everything that has even been written about English literature ever.)
If you relate to one or many of the things on this list, feel free to reach out! Us English majors have to stick together.